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Month: September 2007 (page 2 of 6)

September 26, 2007

Advertising to Ashley

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Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

Guy Kawasaki moderated a panel of college students in a combination panel/ focus group about marketing to the Wired generation. The results are predictably astounding.

See the one hour video here.

Conversations are electronic– two users sent over 4000 text messages each month. From texting, they progress to mobile voice communication; nobody uses landlines anymore. Very few actually use the camera function of the mobile phone; they prefer digital cameras.

They use e-mail serially. Every panelist said that they can be reached via e-mail throughout the day.

Here’s the interesting part- they all use MySpace and Facebook and consider that to be the primary communication tool. When asked to explain the fascination, they all pointed to communication as the primary reason.

They read but don’t write blogs. Most read celebrity blogs and don’t comment (no surprise there). None of them knew what a RSS feed is. They rely on wikis to obtain information but are somewhat skeptical about the veracity of the information there. If they see a disclaimer from a moderator, they tune out immediately.

They rarely watch television and when they do, they use TiVo to block ads.. They watch YouTube and read magazines. Wired Magazine is on everyone’s reading list. When asked how they receive marketing communications, they pointed to celebrity users. Endorsements of a product, by a celebrity, hold a tremendous amount of value with them.

When questioned about their dream gadget, all of them requested a device that integrated an iPod, a cell phone, and a personal computer that had data safety if lost.

What does that mean to us, real estate marketers, in the next five years? These young adults will be the first time home buyers of 2010-2020. Certainly, their habits will change as they age but their commitment to communications technology and social networking will not.

Does this mean that the real estate weblog of the future will be written by Paris Hilton on Facebook? If you sell a home to Matt Leinart, you’ll want to make sure your Facebook profile publishes his video endorsement Read more

September 25, 2007

The purpose of civilization . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I make my living as a hard-headed, practical man, but I live in a very abstract world. Because of the Anglin children, I’ve been thinking about the idea of fatherlessness, a topic I’ve written about in the past:

I was doing that fatherstuff, to the extent I understand it, which amounts to teaching boys how to be men, and, in other circumstances, teaching girls how to relate to men. You can’t pick up a magazine without discovering what poor specimens of humanity men are. “Men make lousy women!” a woman’s magazine will reveal. “Husbands are not the best wives!” discloses a journal for married women. “Fathers are inadequate mothers!” a mother’s magazine proclaims. And the rejoinder to all those with a deathgrip on the obvious is: “Well, duh!”

A father is the provider, his most important job. If he neglects it in order to preen as an ersatz mommy, the children suffer. A father is the moral leader, obliged to take it on the chin again and again; that’s how children learn how to take it on the chin. A father is the defender, the one who confronts the burglar when mom and the kids are hiding under the bed. Fathers are everything we claim to admire when we use the word “manly” and everything we affect to despise when we use the word “male”, but, at bottom, fathers are not mothers. We need mothers to do what mothers do, and we need fathers to do what fathers do, and when children are denied one or the other, they suffer. You won’t read this in a women’s magazine, and you won’t read it in a men’s magazine unless it’s tattooed into a well-tanned navel. But it’s the truth.

But the main job of being a father is simply being around. I’m not congratulating myself for what I did with Xavier, because I knew it was temporary. He didn’t have a father all of a sudden, he just had a weak little prosthetic, and that only for a while. But I taught him what little I could of the manly art of manliness, what little Read more

September 24, 2007

Stand by for the real estate market shakeup

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Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

This is excerpted from today’s Inman News:

“RealUmbrella, a new site for home buyers and sellers that launches today in California, will not make many friends in the real estate brokerage industry, but it’s not supposed to.

At its Web site, the company states that brokers, Realtors and agents that exist today “are being re-purposed for tomorrow. Stand by for the real estate market shakeup.”

The company seeks to link for-sale-by-owner buyers and sellers directly in an online platform that features digital documents and electronic signatures for a flat fee.”

Here is the URL, www.realumbrella.com, so you can see for yourself the Big Giant Threat this particular we-do-nothing-for-less-in-fact-we’re-almost-like-a-real-Real-Umbrella-logocompany poses to Realtors. It might be good to note that there is NO company, proposal, idea or random thought ever, that attacks Realtors, that is too irrelevant for Inman to not select as “feature news”. It’s all good. I love the quote from some not-quite-bright dimwit, “brokers, Realtors and agents that exist today are being re-purposed for tomorrow. Stand by for the real estate market shakeup.”

I am standing by. Enjoying the hallucinatory thought process that would lead to making such a stupid statement. I’m thinking that Dave Liniger letting a fart over the weekend will have a greater effect than anything the RealUmbrella company will ever do.

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NUMBER1EXPERTlogoOn the off chance that you did not receive an email from Best Image Marketing, I am giving a “webinar” on Wednesday morning (9 AM PT). Anyone can listen in, if they care to. Here is the link to register. There are some great past webinars there as well and I’m thinking that the one I do Wednesday will wind up there a day or so later, if Wednesday morning isn’t convenient for you.

September 24, 2007

Lani Anglin’s brother’s children lost their father yesterday. Here’s what you can do to help…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Lani Anglin lost a brother yesterday, and his children lost their father. April Groves has the details at Lani’s site.

We can count the beads later, but now is the time for practical action.

Aaron Anglin is survived by a wife and two very young daughters. The way I’m reading things, he died without life insurance, which puts those three ladies on a very hard road.

If you can spare something for them, put it in the form of negotiable funds — cash, cashier’s check or money order — and overnight it to:

      Aleisha Anglin
      c/o Lani Anglin
      2719 Costa Azul Cove
      Leander, TX
      78641

April is working on setting up a donation account with Bank of America, and I’ll amend this post when that account becomes available. In the meantime, Jay Thompson has set up a donation system using PayPal.

But: I will promise you that there are people who will want to be paid now, and this young family will have immediate and ongoing needs. There was a time in your life when fate could have hit you this hard. Now is your chance to redeem that good fortune.

More: At GeekEstate Blog, Michael Price is auctioning a tricked-out 30GB iPod, with the proceeds going to the Anglin family.

Benn Rosales reflects on these tragic events, finding grounds for hope despite everything.

Jay Thompson has a rundown of today’s activity on the RE.net, including links to many other posts. I am always very proud when I have the privilege of setting my shoulder beside his to get something done. Jay is honor made manifest, and I am honored to know him.

Here is trust fund information:

A trust fund has been set up for the children:
Guaranty Bank, Acct# 3805908914
Checks payable to James Johnson (grandfather)
ITF Eleanor & Mackenzie Anglin

And: if you have the ability to donate a big chunk of money, here is a discussion of how you might make a huge and enduring difference in the lives of these children.

Here are a couple of buttons, large and small, that you can use on your own weblog/web site. These incorporate Jay’s PayPal donation interface, so your readers can make donations online by credit card. Copy Read more

September 24, 2007

The Odysseus Medal: Getting ARMs back up on their own two feet

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

September 24, 2007

Prometheus abundant: Giving the gift of mind

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Do you want to fight a war on poverty? A war on terror? A war on the senseless waste of the sole source of capital, the human mind? Here’s your chance. For two weeks in November, you’ll be able to buy two XO laptops, the One-Laptop-Per-Child computer, with one coming to you and the other going to a hungry young mind overseas.

From the Boston Globe:

With orders for its rugged XO laptop falling short of its initial goal, the One Laptop Per Child project announced today that it would let consumers in the United States and Canada buy the cute computer for a limited time.

In an interview last week, Nicholas Negroponte, the former MIT Media Lab director and founder of the so-called $100 laptop initiative, conceded that he had not locked in the 3 million orders that he once said were necessary to trigger mass production.

The new “Give 1, Get 1” initiative could be the antidote, he said, by helping to spread the project.

For a limited two-week span in November, people will be able to buy two laptops for $399, one for the buyer and one for a child in a developing country.

My take: Donate both, perhaps with one going to a child in your own home town. Even better:

Starting today, people who simply want to donate a laptop to a child in a developing country for $200 can do so online at XOgiving.org.

I think there must be three billion candidates for this machine, so I can’t imagine how most of them will get one before they are no longer children. But the bounty of the harvest is planted one seed at a time.

Prometheus literally means “foresight.” Because of the gift of mind, the uniquely Hellenic gift, I live in a world of vast abundance. I used to joke that Americans should “count their microprocessors instead of sheep,” but, by now, I can’t get an accurate count of the microprocessors sitting on my desk. When I think about some young Prometheus growing up chained to the stultification of ignorance, indolence and superstition, I could not be more grateful for this chance to Read more

September 23, 2007

Can the NAR Improve a Buyer’s Financing Experience?

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

Realtors have to stop complaining about the sorry status of the lending industry.

Why?

They have the power to make a difference but refuse to take action. I have often heard the Realtors’ cry for licensing of loan originators and a plea for lending advisers to adopt a fiduciary capacity when originating a mortgage loan. Steve Berg makes an excellent case on The San Diego Home Blog for abolishing dual capacity, licensing originators, and establishing a fiduciary capacity for loan originators. The problem? Realtors are waiting for the lending industry to do this. That just ain’t gonna happen.

Realtors assume a fiduciary capacity for buyers. With that capacity comes a responsibility to assure that the buyers is getting good loan advice. The challenge? It’s the money, stupid!

How can the NAR really protect the consumer from unscrupulous loan originators? Adopt a standard which closely aligns itself with what the NAR membership wants. NAR membership wants to deal with licensed originators. NAR membership wants an independent fiduciary duty imposed upon originators.

Here are three ways Realtors can adopt to truly align their buyers with the originators they want:

1- Stop referring loans to originators at federally chartered banks. These banks are exempt from licensing and are limited in their product selection. The only way a fiduciary relationship can be established for your buyer is to refer him/her to an independent mortgage broker who is able to shop ALL of the big banks and smaller mortgage companies.

2- Insist on loan commitments from originators who are General Mortgage Associates of the of the National Association of Mortgage Brokers. To date, this is the only national organization that has stated that its membership must act in a fiduciary capacity to the borrower. In practice, the NAMB doesn’t give a damn but at least they state that they do.

3- Prohibit the membership from originating loans. That means that all affiliated business arrangements and common ownership of lending institutions and brokerages must be terminated. It further means that splits for individual Realtors (from employing brokers) will Read more

September 23, 2007

Voting for The People Choice Award: The long and short of short-listing Odysseus Medal nominations

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Week by week, I’m seeing more and more great Odysseus Medal nominations. To get to a short-list of twenty posts — which still may be too long — I’m having to cut some very good weblog entries. In consequence, this week I’m showing the rest of the long-list as well as the short-list of People’s Choice candidates.

In both lists, the posts are shown in random order. People will tend to favor the top or bottom of a list, so I’m trying flatten the curve of outbound clicks so everyone gets the exposure.

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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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.

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September 23, 2007

Is Greenspan to Blame for the Housing Crisis? And, if he is, is this entirely a bad thing?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The second half of a US News dyscomium on Alan Greenspan’s Fed:

The global spread of capitalism has increased inflation-dampening competition throughout the world and allowed investors to accept lower yields when investing in bonds. What’s more, globalization has boosted incomes, in Asia and beyond. That has expanded the pool of savings that can flow into U.S. debt, forcing rates lower. The result, according to a 2006 paper by economist Tao Wu at the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, is a “substantially weakened” Fed.

Then again, Greenspan might want to embrace his role in all this. Just as the Internet bubble left behind Google, eBay, and 90 million miles of fiber optic cable, the credit bubble upgraded America’s aging housing infrastructure and created a host of online services—Realtor.com, Zillow—that have permanently shifted the balance of power from real-estate agents to consumers. As Australian economist and bubble-ologist Jason Potts puts it, “A bubble is good for growth because it creates a low-cost environment for experimentation.” Even if it eventually pops.

It’s understood that unwarranted risk results in a voluntary transfer of wealth from the badly-advised to the better-advised. In real estate, professional investors are slavering at the sidelines waiting to pick up foreclosed homes.

For my own part, I find myself wondering why only a few price categories have risen substantially during what has been the ten years since the U.S. went of the Volckerized pseudo-gold-standard. I had thought the answer was in productivity increases owing to technology, but I hadn’t considered the impact of much cheaper imported goods, especially from China.

What Paul Volcker was doing, and what Greenspan was doing until 1997 or so, was surfing the price of gold as a guide for currency inflation. If the price of gold was relatively stable, then the Fed was inflating the currency at approximately the same rate that productivity was growing. Post hoc — irrational exuberance, dot.com bomb, Enron/Tyco/etc., 9/11, housing boom — the price of gold is up substantially, which argues that the money supply has increased far ahead of productivity. Except that prices for services and manufactured goods (excluding housing) have not risen accordingly. Ignoring Read more

September 22, 2007

Approving A Loan The Careless Way

by

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

Just ran across this in letters to the editor section of the Aug 13 issue of BusinessWeek. Wanted to pass it along.

___

Approving A Loan The Careless Waybusinessweek logo

“Why Fannie and Freddie are fidgety” (News & Insights, July 30) talks about “low-documentation loans.” It would be interesting to know how many “fake-documentation loans” have been made.

About three years ago we subpoenaed the mortgage application that a plaintiff in a bogus lawsuit had submitted to a national lender. Attached to her application were copies of W-2 forms stolen from two different people whose annual earnings were much higher than the plaintiff’s. The plaintiff had simply pasted her own name onto the copies. She did not even bother changing the Social Security numbers on the W-2 forms.

Thus, the lender received an application with two W-2 forms, which, between them, contained three different Social Security numbers. They still approved the loan!

David L. Hagan
Pismo Beach, Calif.

September 22, 2007

Will Google be a victim of the sub-prime mess? “It is inconceivable that mortgage-related advertising revenue isn’t shrinking”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Barrons:

Ever since Google (ticker: GOOG) whiffed on its second-quarter earnings, fans and critics alike have been entertaining this critical question.

Critics such as Barron’s Roundtable member Fred Hickey are convinced that not even GOOG can avoid the impact of the credit mess that has rocked financial markets and prompted the Fed to slash the fed-funds rate by a half point. In a recent edition of his newsletter, High Tech Investor, Hickey wrote that Google’s advertising revenues are likely to take a hit next quarter and beyond.

On the other hand, a number of brokerage analysts have taken a close look at the issue and have run to Google’s defense. Jeff Lindsay of Bernstein Research recently estimated that Google’s cash flows would dip only 10% in an unlikely “worst case” scenario, and he thinks the shares could climb to 625. The stock closed Friday just above 560.

Then, there’s the horse’s mouth. Late last week, Google executives told reporters in New York that mortgage-related advertisers are indeed cutting their budgets, but they aren’t expected to reduce spending on Google search ads. According to Reuters, Jon Kaplan, director of financial-services advertising at Google, declared: “People are cutting their budgets but [Web] search is not the first thing, it’s the last thing.”

That comment is reminiscent of the ruminations heard before the dot-com implosion. But Google is simply arguing that its search is so effective and efficient that advertisers may cut print, broadcast and even other Internet spending, but not their placements with Google. It’s fair to assume that Yahoo! (YHOO) and AOL are likely to feel even more pain from the mortgage meltdown because they rely more on banner ads than Google, which has revolutionized revenue generation on the Web with its “paid search” technology.

“Every single day that somebody is looking for a mortgage…these campaigns from these financial customers are on 24-7, 365 days a year,” says Tim Armstrong, president of Google’s advertising division in North America. “So our ecosystem actually mimics what the GDP looks like.”

Granted, with a $174.8 billion market cap that dwarfs the GDP of many sovereign nations, Google might think it mirrors the Read more

September 22, 2007

If you don’t have green, use red: Fidel Castro reads Alan Greenspan, but not at full price . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Photo from the Drudge Report:

What is Fidel Castro reading?

Let’s take a closer look…

And like any smart senior-citizen on a fixed income…

…he bought it from a discount retailer…

(Sorry about the image quality. Only on TV do photos improve when they are massively enlarged.)

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September 22, 2007

Forward into the past: Now you can upgrade Vista to XP

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

It’s churlish of me to chortle, so I’ll begin by saying that all Power PC (i.e, not Intel-based) Macintoshes running all versions of OSX through Tiger have the ability to launch OS9 in an emulator, running any OS9 compatible software side-by-side with OSX. I have a ton of software that I wrote for the Mac in the 1990s that I have never ported to OSX, so I run it from time to time in the OS9 “blue box.”

Now: On to the chortling: From CNET News.com:

While Microsoft is still pushing Vista hard, the company is quietly allowing PC makers to offer a “downgrade” option to buyers that get machines with the new operating system but want to switch to Windows XP.

The program applies only to Windows Vista Business and Ultimate versions, and it is up to PC makers to decide how, if at all, they want to make XP available. Fujitsu has been among the most aggressive, starting last month to include an XP disc in the box with its laptops and tablets.

“That’s going to help out small- and medium-size businesses,” Fujitsu marketing manager Brandon Farris told CNET News.com.

Hewlett-Packard also started a program in August for many of its business models. “For business desktops, workstations and select business notebooks and tablet PCs, customers can configure their systems to include the XP Pro restore disc for little or no charge,” HP spokeswoman Tiffany Smith said in an e-mail. She said it was too soon to gauge how high customer interest has been. “Since we’ve only been offering (it) for about a month, we don’t really have anything to share on demand.”

A Microsoft representative confirmed there were changes made over the summer to make it easier for customers to downgrade to XP. Under Microsoft’s licensing terms for Vista, buyers of Vista Business and Vista Ultimate Edition have always had the right to downgrade to XP, but in practice this could be challenging. In June, Microsoft changed its practices to allow computer makers that sell pre-activated Vista machines to order Windows XP discs that could be included inside the box with PCs, or shipped to Read more

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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.

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