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Archives (page 154 of 372)

December 2, 2008

Does “Googleopoly” = Evil ?

by

IDX Search Entrepreneur

Author website

I have a running news search going for anything that has the words “Google” and “Real Estate” in it. More often than not, this search returns cookie cutter press releases designed to reassure agents who plunked down a credit card for a cookie-cutter Web site (“Real Estate Agent Ollie Tabooger Adds Custom IDX Tools to his Web site” — film at 11), but it occasionally yields something interesting. Over the weekend, I got a link to a one-sided attack on Google that was published by the Atlanta Journal Constitution, which offered no forum for a reply, so allow me to retort:

The piece, called “Googleopoly darkens future of innovation” was written by Scot Cleland,  a telecom lobbyist that is fighting Net Neutrality. The Net Neutrality debate is really complex, so I’ll boil it down to a paragraph:

As Ted Stevens tells us, the Internet is a “series of tubes”. On one side of the debate, you have the Tube Builders (AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, etc.) and on the other, you have the Tube Users (Google, eBay, Apple, etc.). The Tube Builders are also Tube Users and they want to charge other Tube Users based on what they are putting into the tubes and how much of it there is. The Tube Users are afraid (based on past behavior) that the Tube Builders will take unfair advantage of their ownership of the tubes so the Tube Users want the Government to regulate the Tube Builders. The Tube Builders like to point out that the Interstate Commerce Commission, which was set up to stop the railroads from doing basically the same thing a hundred years ago,  ended up making the problem worse and they say it is best to let the market work things out.

(Where have I heard that before? In other words, we tax-paying consumers and small business owners will eventually get screwed on this deal no matter who wins.)

Cleland is behind a group called NetCompetition.org, which is funded by the Tube Builders. His beef with Tube User Google is that it is displaying monopolistic tendencies because the deal they tried to put together with Read more

November 30, 2008

“Privacy is an artifact of inefficiency”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I say that just about every time I speak in public, and people always ask me to repeat it, and they inscribe it carefully into their notes.

It’s a simple enough idea: What you’ve thought of all your life as privacy has simply been a function of inefficient data processing tools. The more efficacious the means of acquiring and storing data become, the less privacy — unintentional ignorance by others of observable facts — you will have.

If you find this idea repellent — dang…

It is what it is, and it’s absurd to rebel against it. We are real, physical entities. Our purposive actions sometimes have secondary physical consequences that are potentially observable to other people — and to data acquisition devices. Your best hope of achieving privacy, going forward, is to expire. Short of that, you might try to exist in some sort of extra-physical way. And short of that, you might try doing everything you do where no one — and nothing — else can observe you. And short of all that, swallow hard and prepare to have every fact of your life known, at least potentially, by anyone or everyone else.

This does not bother me at all. I deliberately lead a hugely public life. I’m not showy, I hope, but I never want for someone to be able to say something truthful about me that I have not said first myself. I try to lead a very moral life, but no one is perfect. But what I don’t want, ever, is to give the impression that I am trying to hide my imperfections. (Disclosure: I caused a car accident earlier this evening. No one was hurt, but the front end of my car was smacked up pretty good.)

(People who send me email will have grown used to me replying with multiple names in the CC line. I’m never trying to hide facts about my life, but, I am normally trying very hard to not-hide those facts.)

Another thing I say in speeches is that the world is becoming more and more the realm I would have imagined for myself. Mostly the Read more

November 29, 2008

Who wants to play the Scenius game? Rebuilding The Long List as a micro-blog

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

All right, let’s play a little, shall we?

One of the things that came out of our little scenius on Thanksgiving (which continues through today) was a better way of handling the job I used to do with The Long List of Odysseus Medal nominees. I’ve been ignoring that chore since last Spring, a plausible clue that I just might end up ignoring it forevermore. Even so, it was a good idea, and I learned a lot of cool stuff from the code I wrote to manage The Long List scroller that used to live in our sidebar.

What I want to do for now is to implement another kind of sidebar scroller, this one more like a micro-blog of useful and informative posts — mostly marketing, but other matters of importance as well. There were people who used The Long List as their feed reader, and this should work even better in that regard.

You can see it in our sidebar right now. It’s the scroller box headed “SCENIUS: SWITCHED-ON MARKETING” — with links to 50 highly-relevant weblog posts.

If you want to play along with the development process, you can be a big help.

How?

Break this software:

<!-- BEGIN Scenius -->
<p><div style="display:block; width:95%;
height:320px; overflow:auto; padding-left:6px;
padding-right:6px; padding-top:3px;
border:1px solid #a9a9a9; ">
<?PHP $ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 
"http://scenius.bloodhoundblog.net/");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch); ?></div></p>
<!-- END Scenius -->

I’m serious. I want you to install that code in your sidebar and see if you can break it.

There are two ways we know of that you might be able to break it.

First, the PHP may not want to work for you. If that happens, I would love to see a screen shot in your email to me about what happened. So you know: I do not believe this will happen. We broke it every which way yesterday, and I think I have code that should work on any true Apache web server.

The second way that this code could fail is that it might not look right. It should come into your sidebar as a well-behaved citizen. It should inherit your sidebar’s style sheets, and it should scroll top to bottom but not left to Read more

November 29, 2008

Someday soon we may have to turn back the clock on home lending

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
Someday soon we may have to turn back the clock on home lending

Furniture stores are offering weekly payments. Department stores and jewelry stores are making Christmas easier with layaway plans.

Check the calendar. Did someone dial the clock back to 1968?

Not quite, but the credit crunch has got us looking backwards in time to try to remember how we used to do business, back before easy credit made things so easy.

Here’s the dirty little secret no one shared with you: For many, many years, the business of America has been credit.

Car dealerships don’t sell cars, they sell financing, selling your loan at a discount as soon as your tires hit the pavement.

Furniture stores don’t sell furniture, they use your desire for new furniture to get you to sign a promissory note.

One of the best protections of your financial interests is called Regulation Z. The Z reportedly stands for Zales, the easy credit jewelry store.

New home builders are in the same game. That’s why the incentives are so much better if you use the builders’ lender.

And that’s why there’s no interest for the first six months. Or no payments at all for the first two years. And all it takes is one quick signature…

But those days are done. Consumers — and corporations — are defaulting on debt like never before in history. The buyers of promissory notes aren’t buying any longer. Instead, they’re in Washington begging for bailouts.

And that leaves the furniture stores and the jewelry stores back in the merchandise business. They need to come up with ways to get people with no money to part with what little they have — a little at a time — in order to have any sort of cash flow at all.

And all this will come to real estate, too. We still have easy credit, but when interest rates start to climb, we’ll see our own kinds of “old fashioned” financing arrangements: Seller carrybacks, land contracts, wraps, lease purchases, etc.

We may be headed into tough times, but we still have a roadmap from Read more

November 28, 2008

On giving thanks: The Thanksgiving Scenius and the Thanksgiving scene and the abundance of love

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

This was a tough week for our house for a few reasons. One is that I am working through a contract, a situation in which my ability to communicate with my clients was all but shut down. This was a first for me, and painful. I understood what was happening, but not necessarily why it happened. I knew I had to keep plowing ahead though, and Wednesday we finally got back on some solid ground, something to be thankful for and grow from.

As bad as that was, the toughest thing we dealt with was a death. A teenager- a beautiful, intelligent, funny, and sweet child of 16, we had known her since she was 3, one of the few people in the world who was a friend to both of our kids, died in an automobile accident. She was a passenger on a sunny morning drive in the country, in a car with her girlfriends- cranking up the music, singing, goofing off, celebrating life with the joyous freedom that only teenage girls are capable of. I can’t help but smile when I picture a car full of girls, laughing out loud, full of life, full of hope, full of happiness… Then the driver ran a red light.

She had moved to a small neighboring community, and we didn’t see much of her any more, still, the friends of your kids hold a special place in your heart- as any Mom will tell you. The tiny community she lived in was shaken to it’s very core. The ripple effect- so many families knew everyone involved- the girls in the car as well as the couple who had the green light and hit the girls. It will take years to heal from this, and yet, and yet… The viewing was full of life. Yes, young people came to say good-bye to their dear friend, but teenagers are life itself- it oozes from them, they can’t contain it. Memories and testaments to this child and the special place she held in the hearts of so many people were everywhere you turned and this funeral was Read more

November 27, 2008

The Thanksgiving Day scenius at BloodhoundBlog

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Teri Lussier and Eric Blackwell get up early in a time zone two hours earlier than mine. Cheryl Johnson lives an hour later than me, but I don’t think she ever sleeps. Anyway, this morning I woke up to Teri, Eric and Cheryl gnawing on a bunch of insanely great ideas by email.

That’s a scenius, y’all: Smart, focused people concentrating on well-understood problems, looking for innovative solutions.

I chipped in a little here and a little there, and then, just like that, we landed on a brand new way of thinking about community building with hyper-local weblogs.

My piece of the puzzle was new software, but what we’re doing is not a tool but a praxis, a working procedure. As a consequence, I’m not going to teach this until BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix. I’ll show you how to use your weblog to make better connections with other local — non-real estate — blogs, even as you both improve your SEO and maximize the SEO benefits of weblogging. This is killer stuff, literally the hammer-tap in just the right spot, a cornucopia of benefits for a minimal effort.

But: It involves theory, preparation and a certain amount of software hacking, so we’re going to do it when we can do it all together, side-by-side and step-by-step in Phoenix.

I know money is tight. Pinch your pennies and bring them to Phoenix. We’re going to make it worth your while…

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November 27, 2008

One for the Authors…

by

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

One of the things I am most thankful for this Thanksgiving are the people who code, write, and give form to the internet. I am a huge defender of intellectual property rights as well as compensating those with links who author, post, and code on sites around the web.

I am honored to be able to write here and be one of the dawgs. I still feel intimidated by some of the great folks I get to write with here. I am well compensated for my efforts both with an audience and a place on the right hand of Odysseus’s blog with a link. With that in mind, please know that what I am about to say is out of respect for your generosity, Greg.

I am not a nameless faceless content generator. I am an author. I could not ask for more freedom and respect than Greg offers to us. Thank you, sir.

I am seeing three trends that are violating my respect of authors and creators in the real estate space and I want to get them off of my chest. Thanks for your patience while I do.

Ugly Trend #1: De-emphasizing of Authors on Group Blogs.

If you author a post on a blog that I have anything to say about, you will receive credit and links for your efforts. Simple as that. The current trend of consciously shifting the focus onto the domain and away from authors is offensive to me. Enough said. I got upset when Trulia no followed links to sites that gave them content (err..listings) and said something. Taking author links away from those who write is no different than no following them and I feel the need to be consistent. Good enough to hire, not good enough to marry? No thanks.

Ugly Trend #2: Content Stealing via RSS Feed

My buddy Kevin Koitz just guest posted on my Search blog about WordPressDirect and the increased ease of splog creation and the fact that it takes authenticity away from a blog / site. My antidote on WP blogs? This plugin or the one that is in Cheryl’s Read more

November 26, 2008

Launching SplendorQuest.com: Love among The Unfallen at every wavelength of heaven’s light

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is the official launch of SplendorQuest.com, the official first post. I’m cross-posting it at BloodhoundBlog, as well.

Fair warning: This post is comprised of an extract from my novel, The Unfallen. After the “more” tag, you will be exposed to romantic fiction involving sexually playful adults engaged in actual life-like grown-up encounters. If you’re not comfortable with that kind of thing, skip ahead now. The nets are awash in content, after all, and almost none of it is about grown-ups. This post is nothing but a tiny glob of glowing phosphor on the vast oceans of information. Feel free to swim away with my blessings.

But: If you do want to catch a glimpse of actual grown-ups in action, I might have what you need. The splendor that is the grail of SplendorQuest.com is a state of mind, a state of being, a mental fugue state where being and awareness of being and worship of and delight in being all become the same thing. The fiction I write — or the best of the fiction I write — is about people who live — and who know enough to love — that splendor. The extract shown below is a snapshot of those kind of people at their best.

You may want to read things into this text, and, if you do, you will be wildly incorrect, but there’s nothing I can do about that. All I can do is be what I am, and that’s why I want to start SplendorQuest.com with this text in particular. This is a work of large ambition: I wanted to rescue romance from the Romance genre as a worthy subject of literature, and I wanted to rescue sex from smut. But more than both of those, I wanted — I want, continuously — to rescue the ideas of reverence and worship and rejoicing and adoration and exaltation from the grave, from empty pie-in-the-sky promises. I know that the ideas I treasure are real because I live them in my own life, in my very best moments. There will doubtless be many more grand statements of what splendor Read more

November 26, 2008

As an expression of gratitude to the Bloodhounds, here’s an Unchained Melody for Thanksgiving

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Thanksgiving was a holiday established by productive people to celebrate the success of their work. –Ayn Rand

I love this place — this life, this earth and this tiny little corner of the net. The accretion of evidence leads me to believe that the world is becoming more and more the realm I would have designed for myself. Yes, we’re headed into serious economic trouble, and, yes, we’re headed that way under the leadership of a man who has never held a job in his life and who makes no secret that he knows nothing about the causes of wealth and poverty.

But: Even so: So what?

We are on the cusp of riches without limits. We are literally standing around getting soaked to the skin as soup rains down from the skies, and yet we are so much in the thrall of our treasured wounds that we can’t even see it. That much, at least, is a correctable nuisance.

The curtain goes up at eleven tonight on Act Three of my life, and I know better than anyone that I am the best beneficiary of the riches I talk about. All my life people have asked me for writing advice, and, without intending to be glib, I told them simply this: Have something to say, and have a way of saying it. I am befriended by the times, and — amazingly to me — I am by now able to ship these piles of ore I have quarried from my mind. Do you want to know how to change the world forever, for the good? You do it one mind at a time — starting with your own.

I’m grateful to the Bloodhounds — to the people who read, comment and write here — both for BloodhoundBlog and for Unchained. I’m thankful for our clients, who have been prosperous enough to keep us in business. I don’t think I ever adequately express my gratitude to Cathleen, who gives me everything that can be had from another person. There are so many others — Richard Riccelli and Brian Brady and Teri Lussier — so I hope Read more

November 26, 2008

Digging In To Dig Out

by

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

Author website

Wholesale lenders, escrow companies and title companies are sending me e-mails this afternoon:

In observance of the Thanksgiving holiday and as a demonstration of our commitment to our core values, ABC Financial will be closed Thursday and Friday (and Saturday and Sunday).  We wish you and yours a joyous holiday season and thank you for your business.

WTF ?

Okayfine.  Rant over, captured in three letters.  Sermon begins:

Thanks, Dave.  The words of encouragement are appreciated; readers might look at the words of the song he quoted, though:

If you’re going through hell
Keep on going, don’t slow down
If you’re scared don’t show it
You might get out
Before the devil even knows you’re there
Yeah, If you’re going through hell
Keep on moving, face that fire
Walk right through it

“Keep on moving, face that fire.”  A good reminder for us to persevere in the face of adversity.  What the title, escow, and mortgage companies are doing, however, is living in a 2005 world.  There are loans to be funded, resales to be recorded, and transactions to be closed.  There are, without a doubt, thousands of transactions that won’t fund, record and close on Friday…and thousands of clients who won’t be able to take advantage of the weekend to move.  Double that number if you count the chain reaction real estate transactions produce.

Complacency breeds contempt in my world.  I have always considered the last day of the month (which is Friday) to be a VERY important day.  If you can close ONE extra transaction, on Friday, instead of having it bleed over until Monday, here’s what you’ll gain:

1- One hour of phone time.  When the transaction won’t close because of the closed escrow company, we all have to make between 3-5 phone calls, explaining what happened and reassuring all principals that the transaction is fine.

2- One hour of e-mail time. Rushing to get last minute conditions in takes 30 minutes.  It takes another 30 minutes to get the weekend out of the employees’ minds, after their 4-day rest.

3- Four days of simple interest (or spending power).  When everyone gets their money faster, they can invest or spend it.

4- Points in the “Read more

November 26, 2008

Social bookmarking for home search. Will it work?

by

Realtor, Urban Jedi

Author website

This has been in draft mode for a few days now since I commented on this at Mashable. That’s just as well since Benn over at AG was able to get a look under the hood which changes my feelings about this new bookmarking app for home lookers. (now in beta testing)

I’ve been a big fan of using Delicious for my own personal research for a while now. It offers a simple way to tag, take notes, and store in the cloud what it is I need to understand about something I’m curious about so that down the road I can either share that information with others or keep it private to myself.

Dwellicious puts forth the effort to do this for home search. As some of you may remember, this has been tried before with little success (if at all) for some reason. My take at first blush is that it’s something that users will be hard pressed to adopt. I have worked with several tech savvy clients who have done their own home search with the tools to share information and what I have found is that they are very reluctant to share anything about their decision making process. People hold their cards close to their chest when purchasing homes and often don’t even know what it is they want until they see it. So, for note taking purposes, I don’t know that it will be much help, but it’s nice to have the option.

It’s too bad you don’t see a consumer based search site that has all of the inventory data with a few solid consumer centric options like saving, RSS updates, and sharing without all the advertising, hierarchy of ‘featured listings’ and sponsorship options getting in your way. Bookmarking while weeding through various sites seems to be a chore few will have the know how or patience to handle. Another problem might be the slowness of updating on these sites to make any timely use of RSS. It could be a rewarding experience for those to Read more

November 25, 2008

What’s Mu? Pulling unforeseen results out of BloodhoundBlog.net

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We launched BloodhoundBlog.net just a week and a day ago, and already WordPress-MultiUser is changing my approach to everything in the weblogging world.

First, just as a caveat: It’s a bear to set up. Because of BloodhoundBlog, we have an enormous amount of server horsepower, but I think it matters a great deal that we live on a dedicated server. We can customize the host to live the way we need it to live, and we command a lot of tech support attention from Hostgator.com — which has been invaluable.

But as with the discussion of FeedWordPress, living in the Mu universe leads to different ways of thinking.

An example: We’re wrestling with domain mapping right now, but, once we get it working, we will be able to put our affiliated vendors into their own blogs, running under their own domain names, in two wags of a BloodPuppy’s tail. If you think about the agony of setting up unique WordPress.org blogs, the upfront effort of getting WP-Mu to run will be handsomely repaid.

Likewise, both WordPress (dot org) and WP-Mu were upgraded to version 2.6.5 tonight. I already upgraded the BloodhoundBlog.net weblogs. And sometime between now and Sunday, I will get to upgrade a solid dozen WP.org blogs. Between now and the new year, most or all of those will be moving to a new WP-Mu installation.

Here’s the best bet: The ability to set up clone weblogs on demand will permit a very granular kind of hyper-local weblogging. This suggests to me one or two more WP-Mu installations, strictly for real estate purposes.

And here’s a great big what’s more: Give me another week with this software and let’s see what else I can come up with…

November 25, 2008

Weblogging without weblogging: If syndication be the food of love, feed on — I crave excess of it!

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I am playing with syndication on BloodhoundBlog.net. You can ignore me, although I’m sure I’ll have more to say soon enough.

 
Later: Okay, here’s what I’m up to. That’s a BloodhoundBlog.net weblog that uses the plug-in FeedWordPress to create an automatically-updating weblog built from the RSS feeds from the home weblogs of six different BloodhoundBlog contributors.

These really are different feeds. Eric Blacwell came in with RSS 0.92, Teri Lussier with RSS2, Cheryl Johnson and Chris Johnson came in from Feedburner, Geno Petro supplied a Blogger.com feed, and I took Brian Brady’s ActiveRain feed.

Yes, you read that right ARbeings. You can syndicate your AR and Localism content to your “outside” blog.

Do please note: If you do not own the feeds you are syndicating, you are stealing. Don’t do that.

November 24, 2008

Citi’s So Nice I Bought It Twice (a Tin Foil Hat production)

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

Alright, let’s see if I got this straight:

  • Less than 4 weeks ago Citi was purchasing Wachovia in a deal brokered by the FDIC.
  • Less than 3 weeks ago the Fed injected $25 billion into Citi
  • Less than 1 week ago Citi’s shares tumbled
  • Yesterday the Fed injected ANOTHER $20 billion into Citi

Am I forgetting anything?  Oh yeah:

  • Based on share price, Citi is now worth $20 billion… which means we (the taxpayers) have bought her twice!

When Citi was buying Wachovia waaaaaaay back in October, it was apparently strong enough to handle the $42 billion in losses it agreed to take on in exchange for the Fed covering the other $270 billion that Wachovia was going to generate in bad loans.  But now we discover that they actually needed us to purchase them… TWICE, and we’re still unsure if they’ll survive.

(For a clearer picture of which lenders had these bad loans and would fail, read The Mortgage Dance from July of 2008 and click on the “accounting debacle” link which was originally delivered in a speech in August of 2007!  Or you can read about Countrywide beginning its fall back in May of 2007.  My point is that much of this seems obvious now and was actually visible on the horizon quite a while ago.  But the Fed keeps up its Animal House impression, telling us to “remain calm… all is well.”  The possibility of a conspiracy grows so large that now i don’t even leave the house without my Tin Foil Hat.)

I have to wonder if there was more going on in that initial Wachovia deal.  Was Citi getting a cash infusion of some type?  One of the influential directors at Citi is Robert Rubin – the former secretary of the Treasury.  I’m not sure I understand how he didn’t see that Citi was only three weeks away from failing.  Although I can certainly understand how he might have an inside ear at the Treasury.  Was the Wachovia deal a way to support Citi without making a public scene?  That would explain the ensuing public scene (the technical term in economics is hissy-fit) that Citi Read more

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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.

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