There’s always something to howl about.
Thirty years of Elvis Lives. There will probably be more at Marlow’s place. This is John Hiatt and The Goners, with Sonny Landreth finger-picking slide on that pretty black Stratocaster.
Technorati Tags: real estate marketing, real estate photography
Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL
Have you ever felt your stomach drop?
I received an e-mail, from reader Robert Kerr today, asking if I had seen Merrill Lynch’s downgrade of Countrywide Financial. Merrill Lynch believes that Countrywide might face bankruptcy. Make no mistake about it, a collapse of Countrywide Financial will give everybody in the real estate and mortgage industry a case of the “awshits”.
The Secret be damned! I said this was plausible back on April 1, 2007:
Here are some warning signs the painfullly paranoid (like me) might feed upon:
1- Countrywide Announces Change in Board Of Directors
2- Fitch Ratings Agency Downgrades 33% of Countrywide Loan Pools; particularly their “expanded criteria” guidelines which include Pay Option ARMs
3- Methinks he doth protesteth too much; Chairman and Founder Angelo Mozilo sold $140 million worth of stock last year while literally screaming that Countrywide should not be penalized by stock traders because of the subprime meltdown.
Negative amortization loans are an excellent financial planning tool. Countrywide has long been a favorite of originators because of their adaptability and innovative lending products. This time, I think they may have overreached. I’m raising our readiness condition to DefCon-4.
I’ve been getting a lot of traffic on my home weblog. The reason is simple; I’ve been writing a lot about Countrwide lately. If you Google, “Countrywide In Trouble”, I’m close to the top. This is not a pat on the back for my SEO technique, it’s a realization of how severe the reach of a Countrywide collapse may be.
Two weeks ago, I questioned why Angelo Mozilo wasn’t owning up to the severity of the problem and getting the bad loans off of the books so we could move on with our lives. More traffic on the weblog. That’s a bad sign. I followed up and wrote a little joke about a federal bailout of Countrywide by President Fred Thompson in 2009 and likened Countrywide to Chrysler. I played with fuzzy numbers and determined that Countrywide’s net worth could conceivably drop some 70% from defaulted loans. Huge traffic on the weblog! Google finance and Yahoo finance picked it up. I think I struck a nerve.
This is Read more
Central Phoenix, of course, but your boy doesn’t actually work at the library, he just hangs out there from 9 am to 9 pm. This is from Zillow.com:
Central City residents are distinct from people in surrounding areas because:
- A larger number did not complete high school.
- A higher proportion of them are divorced males.
- There’s a higher percentage of people who work in education, training, or library occupations.
Sorry, Zillovians, I just can’t get enough of this astute counter-marketing. Surprisingly enough, there have been no contributions to the neighborhood discussion fora. Maybe if Zillow offered free cigarettes — or booze — in exchange for real estate questions.
Here are some listings from this creepy neighborhood acrawl with divorced winos. The resident high school drop-outs can barely even get to six multiples of the median home value.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing, Zillow.com
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):
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
Here is an hour long interview I did today. It was a conference call that had about 200 agents listening and sending in questions. I received many emails from the agents saying it was a needed lift for them.
Curtis Johnson sent me the questions that were not answered due to not enough time and I will start posting video (and audio) responses to each of those questions by the end of the week. The external mic I needed to have decent sound quality for the video will be here in a day or two.
Achieving stable success in this business is at least 90% mental (as opposed to specific “techniques”) and that is what I will concentrate on delivering.
In the days of yore (one yore = 5 years on the metric conversion chart), open houses were much different. I almost enjoyed my Sunday afternoons. They were spent with people sincerely looking for a home, a home that fit their personal needs on both a functional and emotional level. The event went something like this: Agent makes home available for showing as a courtesy to the seller who wants to sell and the buyer who wants to buy, potential buyer tours home and makes assessment as to whether the home fits his needs, interested buyer asks questions to learn about features of said home and neighborhood, interested buyer compares recent sales to establish fair price and, having made his decision to purchase, enters meaningful negotiations.
These days, our open house experiences are very different. As an agent, I am a soldier being called to active duty. I am the enemy, and donning pith helmet, medieval shield and evil death ray deflector, I enter battle.
Steve and I both got the open house nod this weekend, and it was so painful as to be funny in hindsight. We enjoyed the usual Happy Hour debriefing, and our experiences were woefully the same.
“How long has it been on the market?” “Why are they moving?” That’s it. That is all anyone wanted to know, and these questions were generally flying as one run-on sentence before they had passed the threshold. Steve suggested that it was time for a little open house strategic planning, a preemptive strike if you will. Post it on the front door, or better yet, adopt Greg’s policy of using those nifty custom yard signs and display the vital statistics there. Even better, include the information in the open house ads we tirelessly run each weekend. No need to have anyone to driving across town when I can save them the trouble.
Keep in mind that we aren’t talking about the hobbyists, or the neighbors, or even the world-weary, sincerely-seeking-a-home contingents. We still get a smattering of these at our open houses. Steve related to me the story of a couple in the latter Read more
Recently, Realtor Genius was called naive for suggesting that actual solutions be provided for the small portion of the market that we call “sub prime.” So, I’ve had my ears/eyes perked for solutions to the sub prime mess that I could share with everyone here…
Yesterday, I read on Mark Cuban’s blog (he’s the Dallas Maverick’s owner, genius business man, billiionaire of Broadcast.com, Web 2.0 savvy, worked at DQ for one day, and is NOT a Realtor) about his idea for how to break the “Boom Bust” cycle of Real Estate. I’m not a Realtor, but I really want to hear everyone’s take on this inventive idea… to me, it’s scary outside of the box!
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Why can’t home owners sell some percentage of equity in their homes on a listed exchange ? Why can’t I “Take My House Public?”
Why not create a market or exchange where homeowners can sell equity in their homes ?
The rules could be very eimple
1. The house is appraised by a company approved by the exchange that lists the houses.
2. “Shares” are set with a Par Value of 10pct of the appraised value. For a 100k dollar house, there are 10 shares potentially available. However at no point in time can more than 40pct of the “shares” in a home be sold. We dont want the opportunity for “hostile takeovers”
3. The price of the shares will of course be set by the market. In a hot market it will be set above par, in a tough market like today, it will sell below Par.
4. All Proceeds from the sale of shares MUST be used to pay down any debt on the home.This is the key element of this approach. By selling equity in a home, the buyer gets an asset based security that will move up and down with the market. If this market is big enough, there should be enough liquidity to move in and out of positions.
The seller receives cash that can be used to pay down the debt and thereby reduce his/her monthly payments. The seller loses a part of the upside if the market Read more
Okay, so I wanted to say “pimp my blog” but that doesn’t make for an alliteration within a title…
I recently found an awesome resource regarding Word Press plugins which should be helpful to a great majority of RE.net bloggers. The following information is from a July article on Mashable.com. Enjoy!
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404 Notifier – Gives you a log of all your 404 errors so you can see why your readers are ending up on broken pages.
Admin Dropdown Menus – Make your crowded admin panel menus neat and orderly by turning them into dropdown menus.
Admin Panel Comment Reply – Adds a “reply to comment” option in the comments section of the admin area.
Ajax Spell Checker – Uses a combination of dictionaries to check your posts.
Auto-hyperlink URLs – Gives you several options for having URLs automatically turn in to hyperlinks.
AWSOM Pixgallery – Designed to allow artists and webcomic creators to create a portfolio of their artwork.
Batch Categories – Adds a page to the category management, showing all the posts that belong to a category making it easier to add to another category, or when using an import tool from another blog.
Custom Admin Menu – Gives you the power to rename, hide or move just about anything you want in the admin area.
Custom Write Panel – Allows you to customize the “Write” panel of WordPress. Hide things you don’t need such as “Post Password” and add things you feel you may need.
Dashbar – Let admins have admin access while working in the frontend of the blog without having multiple windows open.
Dashboard Editor – Ever wanted to change the Dashboard to be more useful? This is the plugin you need.
DashNote – Adds a post-it note feature to the dashboard to jot down notes to yourself.
Digital Fingerprint – Adds a digital fingerprint to your posts so you can search the web to see if your content has been scraped.
Domain Mirror – Will allow one WordPress install to be accessed from multiple domains and will even change the name and URLs based on the address people access it with.
Download Counter – Counts and tracks the downloads of all Read more
Inspired by the glut of controversial posts appearing here lately, I thought I would add one more to the fire. In my recent browsing I stumbled upon a blog that asked a simple question, “Do we need Realtors?” That’s all. That was the whole post. While the questioned seemed relatively simple, the 1000+ (literally) comments made me think a bit harder about this question.
First, let me say that the comments came down on both sides. Many people screamed Yes and No for a variety of reasons, some valid and some simply ludicrous, but the most interesting point that came to my mind was what if someone asked do we need investment bankers? My immediate reaction would be outrage at the attack on my profession. After a bit more consideration, I would ask the more complex question, what has caused that question to be asked? What am I not doing to make my services indispensable to my client?
As an outside observer, I would like to turn this around to suggest what I need and then take a look at how well consumers view realtors meet their needs. Obviously, there will be generalizations here, so if they don’t apply to you, don’t take offense to them.
First, as a consumer I want a realtor to relentlessly try to get me the best deal possible. If I am buying a property, I would like a realtor to help me get the lowest price and if I am selling I would like the opposite. In order to assess this, I need a realtor that knows the market beyond printing out a set of comparable transactions. I would like to know the best blocks to buy and why my house should be valued differently than the house next door.
Realtors fall all over the map in this area; however, on the buyer side they really don’t cut the mustard. To start, the commission structure favors the seller. Most realtors will tout their ethics, but on more than one occasion I have heard and seen realtors take a price that was Read more
The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid, which should be in your feed-reader — especially right now:
What is “crisis-itis?” It is my own diagnosis. It is a form of dementia where the inflicted believes his or her own self worth rises as the situation he monitors worsens. In all cases, the inflicted greatly exaggerates his or her control over events, as well as the size, duration, and impact of those events. In extreme cases, the inflicted seeks to worsen the crisis to inflate his or her self esteem.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
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
Contrary to unpopular belief, Realtors in the Bloodhound Blog pool care about consumers. Oh, I know it’s hard to buy because YOU once had a Realtor not call you back or because you read one single article that got heated, or because the For Sale sign is still crooked in your neighbor’s yard. I am not a Realtor, so I write from a consumer’s point of view.
From the consumer perspective, I feel that I can safely say that no one at Bloodhound lacks passion- be it lenders, Realtors, brokers or regular Joes (or Sallys) like me. There are a few Realtors that are not well informed, far behind the curve and still regurgitating the “buy/sell now, the market is hot hot hot” crap from their Intro to Real Estate classes. None of those people are reading or writing for the BHB.
If you read the nearly 2,000 articles written on the Bloodhound Blog, you’ll note that almost all of them are consumer focused even if the analysis upsets the few old school “buy/sell now, the market is hot hot hot” stragglers by implying that the consumer comes first. The Bloodhound Blog stands for the consumer, not just in words printed on a screen but by perpetuating the idea that the industry should stay informed, and by that sharing of ideas creating a better informed Realtor or lender that in turn has protected their clients from the rare “buy/sell now, the market is hot hot hot” junk.
OF COURSE Realtors are also focused on their business (marketing, SEO, etc); without that task in the list of “To Dos” there would be no product to offer the clients that are supposed to be protected against an ignorant Realtor. Not focusing on business would, in essence, be not focusing on the consumer; therefore, the idea that an article about marketing as not consumer based is bunk.
I don’t care about those “hot hot hot” Realtors- they may be doing just fine. What is upsetting is that anyone could possibly come into the den of Bloodhound and opine that everyone in the industry Read more
The friend of the son of a very good friend — an exceedingly polite young man just out of high school — came by late Friday afternoon to sell me some cutlery. I explained when he called to set the appointment that I was already doing some business with the company he was representing in the form of monogrammed house-warming gifts, but he said he’d like to come by anyway. To practice.
He arrived, carefully unsheathed his samples, and pulled out a three ring binder. He opened his presentation with a hand drawn graph of his progress toward his summer goal; if reached, he said, he would win a scholarship. Then he launched into a rote monologue, cribbed nearly verbatim from his notes. Per the script he handed me each utensil as he talked about it, wasn’t sure what to do with his hands after I refused the third one, and was flustered when I asked about something out of turn. All the sales-guy 101 feints were in play: “If you could choose between one of the two sets today, which would you pick?”; “Just for sitting down with me today, I’m authorized to offer you, for no extra cost, these kitchen shears. Is that something you’d be interested in?”
At which point I stopped him. I’ve sat through thousands of presentations and delivered thousands more. I didn’t need another to confirm what I’ve known forever: I hate sales. And salespeople.
So I waxed parental:
“Why, David, didn’t you ask what I was already using, what about it I liked and didn’t? Turn your head: five feet away is a full set of Wusthof; you should have known that before you came to the door. Why didn’t you ask about the sets I was already buying? Clearly there has been a need.
“Selling isn’t about glib one liners, happy hour entertaining or pat answers to pre-conceived objections. It’s considerably less about form than substance. It’s about having the knowledge and developing the trust in order to fill the real needs of your customers, better than anyone else.” LOVE parental mode.
Since this has a lot to Read more
Sorry, Michael, but sometimes plumbers gotta talk about pipes. This is Teresa Boardman writing at The Real Estate Tomato:
In my humble opinion it isn’t about how many people read me. It is about who reads me and why. It is about speaking directly to the clients you prefer working with. A ton of leads can mean a ton of work and little business. Some of my blog readers are exactly the kind of person I want as a client and others are not. Not all leads are equal. The type and quality of the content does have an impact on the type of leads a blogger attracts.
I think this is dead-on. By pursuing real estate weblogging with a long-term strategy, you can grow your business in the way you want it to grow.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
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: blogging, investment, real estate, real estate marketing
