BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Month: October 2007 (page 8 of 8)

October 2, 2007

Things You Can Legally Do In Nevada

by

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

Author website

1- Gamble your house away.

2- Patronize a prostitute.

3- Fund a stated…(sound of needle scratching across a vinyl record)

It may now be considered a crime to originate a stated income loan in the State of Nevada.  Of course all the waiters, cocktail servers, strippers, and construction workers will be left behind but there will be no stated income loans in Nevada.

Last year, one out of four loans, funded in Nevada, were stated income.  One out of three loans, funded in the Las Vegas metro area were stated income.

Gamble responsibly.

 

October 2, 2007

Oh, good grief! He went to JARED…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Joel Burslem cites a Glenn Kelman quote from a comment to John Cook’s post this morning, but I think this one is more interesting:

By the way, no matter how many times the real estate industry insists that we’re JARED (Just Another Real Estate Discounter) we can’t help but add that our goal is to be different and better, whereas discount brokerages simply aspire to be the same but less expensive. This is why we say we’re not a discount brokerage, we’re an online brokerage.

“JARED” is a genuine neologism as far as I can tell, and a boon to the taxonomy of real estate brokerages.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

October 2, 2007

The Weight Loss Process and the Real Estate Market: The Same Animal in a Different Form

by

Real Estate Investor

Author website

Much like the real estate market my life has taken on significant changes over the past two months.  Fortunately, unlike the real estate market, my life has been on the upswing.  A major focus for me has been weight loss, resulting in my dropping nearly 40 pounds in about two months.  As I am not one for long personal stories, the major reason for sharing this is to relate how weight loss and real estate seem to go hand and hand.

The Realization

I am fat.  Plain and simple, one day I realized I was fat.  There were plenty of signs, quite obvious to others, which I chose to ignore: tighter pants, lower energy, the mirror, etc.  Eventually the mountain of evidence reaches a tipping point; a point at which, despite my best efforts, I simply could not ignore the fact that I was no longer the chiseled college athlete of six years ago.  For me, this point was when, on a whim that was clearly not thought out, I decided to weigh myself.  When the scale read 260 pounds and I officially weighed more than my father, it was a sad day.  The day became even sadder when my wife thoughtfully pointed out that the BMI for a person my height (6′ 2″) suggested that I should weigh 190 (thanks, dear).  

The real estate market reached this point about six months to a year ago.  Much like me, the market chose to ignore that fact that real estate prices were increasing much faster than wages.  Additionally, prices continued to increase at break neck speeds assuming the lowest interest rates in history would get even lower.  At the height of market gluttony, people were using homes as personal cash registers, spending as if the money created from nothing, would magically go on forever.  Then one day, the market hit a tipping point.  For the real estate market, my guess would be the subprime market disaster acted as this point.  At this point people begin to wake up and come to their senses.

The Action Plan

Getting back to the fundamentals of eating right and exercising brought me Read more

October 1, 2007

What Would You Pay For A Real Estate Agent If The Commission Was 100% Optional?

by

Mortgage Planner

Author website

Radiohead is selling tracks from their upcoming album “In Rainbows” online. The price per track, according to the site, “is up to you”.  Fans can choose how much they want to pay for the MP3 tracks, or not pay anything at all.

Was there ever a more confident display of “knowing your value to your clients”?  Of course, many of Radiohead’s fans will pay an optional download fee.

To make this question relevant to us here at Bloodhound Blog, let’s see what our readers think:

October 1, 2007

Budgeting Redfin: Making the numbers work in a corporate brokerage

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Last week Peter Coy at BusinessWeek made a point of asking Redfin’s Glenn Kelman a real estate question. Kelman’s answer wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t great. (The negotiation advantage for unsold spec home occurs once a quarter, not just once a fiscal year.) But it was funny to me, because of this: Why would anyone expect Kelman to know about real estate in the trenches? He’s not like RE/Max’s Dave Liniger, an ex-grunt with a corner office. He’s a corporate guy, a veteran of securitized start-ups.

And that is a completely different world. Kelman provides a pretty candid peek into that world today at Guy Kawasaki’s weblog, a run-down on Redfin’s budgeting process and how things worked out in real life. There is a more corporate take on similar material at Redfin’s blog. Joel Burslem remarked briefly on these posts, and Sandy Kaduce provides a thoughtful analysis at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer‘s real estate weblog.

BloodhoundRealty.com runs out of a 300sf room in our home, and, especially, the passenger cabins of our cars. Glenn Kelman lives in a world I know nothing about. I find the idea of salaried agents interesting — by which I mean exotic — and I could see a benefit to a coordinated, centralized back-office operation, although this might introduce licensing problems across state lines (another good reason to do away with licensing). In any case, I am grateful to everyone who fingered these posts by email, but I don’t think I have anything to add to the discussion.

In comments here yesterday, Kelman said, “At Redfin, we would prefer it if both buyers’ agents and sellers’ agents each charged a fee.” That would be much easier to effect if the commissions were divorced, a topic I definitely am interested in taking up again — and again.

In the meantime, give a look to Kelman’s post at Guy Kawasaki’s blog. It’s a fascinating glimpse into a side of real estate most of us don’t have to think about.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

October 1, 2007

Zero

by

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

egg.jpgI suppose I should care more than I do about the failed ransacking acquisition of Active Rain by Move.com. What’s less than zero? (Big-shot math geniuses should desist from an argument involving negative numbers).

From my overly-simplistic corner, this seems not so much like big news, but like more of the same. It is human nature. Carpetbagging capitalism is enjoying a feeding frenzy in the online real estate world right now. Meanwhile, forward thinking agents and their (reluctant) brokers are eagering jumping at every new opportunity to demonstrate their technical prowess in an attempt to stay relevant. We can’t give our stuff away fast enough. For zero.

Unless an Internet venture wants to do the real work, and this applies equally to the brave new start-up and to an established, money-making web giant like Move.com who has their taser set on world domination, they have three choices: Do nothing but charge less and characterize it as something; offer something for nothing which you can someday sell to someone for a fortune so that they can monetize it silly; or, wait for someone else to do the work and then swallow their platform and their intellectual property whole.

For the entrepreneurial, real estate-minded, all angles would have been killer had the Internet explosion not coincided with what is shaping up to be the worst real estate market in a more than a decade. Just how hard our landing will be in historical terms is yet to be seen. The fact remains; the timing sucks. Yet, those with strength and staying power will ultimately prevail.

Had one well-know rebate company made their big push seven years ago, their ranking on the Success-O-Meter might have been more impressive: More impressive than zero. Russell Shaw spoke to this brilliantly. Their target was (is) the consumer, and it seems that it is the consumer who is ultimately being courted by all of the online portals. Sure, the pay-to-play vendors geared toward the agent population, offering business tools, marketing platforms, lead generation and a paralyzing abundance of other opportunities to achieve untold riches (we are told), are out in force. But, their long-term success is dependent on generating consumer eyes, Read more

October 1, 2007

The Odysseus Medal: Growing your business while controlling your own destiny

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

BloodhoundBlog is addressed to real estate professionals. We won’t reject anyone who wants to come and play, but we made a conscious decision very early on that we would be talking to Realtors, lenders, investors and other professionals, with a special emphasis on real estate webloggers. In that respect, we’re probably a pretty bad example for real estate webloggers to follow. We write about things that are of interest to you, but they aren’t likely to be interesting to ordinary people.

We’re leading into a discussion of last week’s ActiveRain fiasco, so here are two items that I think are very important to real estate webloggers — meaning webloggers who are not writing for the benefit of real estate professionals.

First, the MyBlogLog recent readers widget is not your friend. It visually convinces you that you are writing for the amusement of your real estate weblogging buddies, when in fact you should be writing for your target market, the people who can put money in your pocket.

Second, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should not be your primary traffic-building strategy. Search engines will bring you unique visitors, which can be useful for advertising monetization business models. But search engine traffic comes with a truly gargantuan bounce rate: They land, they see that what they hit wasn’t what they wanted and they’re gone. Search engines can bring you visitors who will come and stay, some of whom might do business with you. But other traffic generating strategies — better targeted and much more viral — will make you a lot more money in the long run. I know I’m shouting down a well because everyone wants to believe SEO is a magic bullet, but facts are facts.

What does this have to do with ActiveRain? The sweet folks at ActiveRain have managed to convince themselves that talking about inside baseball to their good-time buddies will result in SEO traffic that will turn into money for them. This might actually be true, but it seems certain to me that, erg for erg, their energies could have been much better spent. ActiveRain argues that its search results prove it 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