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Archives (page 34 of 372)

September 11, 2020

Overnight News: “Let’s roll.”

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“Profitability? What’s that?”

HousingWire: The upside of the urban exodus: Zillow: Nearly 2 million renters can become homeowners, thanks to telecommuting.

Forbes: WeWork Bets On Outdoor Spaces For The COVID Era.

Forbes: Six Ways Agents And Brokers Can Evolve To Build Better Brokerages.

CNBC: Mortgage lenders just saw record profit, and expect to do better in the next quarter.

Forbes: Surprising Effects Of The Wildfires In California’s Real Estate Industry.

Rob Hahn: The Relationship Narrative and Its Flaws.

TheRealDeal: iBuyer Opendoor eyes $5B IPO via blank-check firm.

City Journal: Chaos is underfathered boys: Breaking Things.

New York Post: ‘Let’s roll’: The heroic final moments of United Flight 93 on 9/11.

September 11, 2020

My 9/11 prayer…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[This is me – Greg – fourteen years ago, when this blog was still a mewling baby. It astounds me to think that the children who were pre-conceptual on 9/11 – aged 0 to 5 – are now the jihadis attempting to destroy Western Civilization from within. We need to do a lot better…]
 

Cathy and I watched The Path to 9/11 on television tonight. I had forgotten that we were in Metro New York for the Turn of the Millennium. My father lives in Connecticut, and we went there that year for New Year’s Day. The photo you see is my son crawling all over a bronze statue of a stock broker in Liberty Park, directly across from what was then the Merrill Lynch Building — on December 30, 1999.

I lived in Manhattan for ten years, from 1976 to 1986. For quite a few of those years, I worked just across from Liberty Park, in the Equitable Building at 120 Broadway. At the other end of that little brick park was the southeast entrance to the World Trade Center complex.

I worked insane hours in those days, and, very often, when I got out of work, I would go sit at this tiny circular plaza plopped down between the Twin Towers. Not quite pre-dawn, still full dark, but completely deserted — and to be completely alone in New York City is an accomplishment. I would throw my head back and look up at the towers, the fourth movement of the Ninth Symphony running note-perfect through my head.

Everything I am describing was either destroyed or heavily damaged on September 11, 2001. Along with the lives of thousand of innocents. Along with the comfort and serenity of their families. Along with the peace of the entire world.

I don’t believe in any heaven except for this earth, this life — the heaven we make every day by pursuing the highest and best within us. The World Trade Center had its faults. I can detail every one. But it was a piece of the sublime, a proud testament to how high, how good our highest and Read more

September 10, 2020

When the punters come out to play, are they tugging a real estate bubble behind them?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Q: Why is it so hard to buy at the top?
A: That’s how you know it’s the top.

Who’s listing actual fee-simple dirt? Could life get any better? Representing hypothetical cubes of air-space amidst spookily-vacant concrete canyons? Not so much.

I just heard that J.P. Morgan is calling its people back to the office, so maybe vertical cities are not dead yet. My bet runs the other way, and, doubling-down, that employers incur liability by requiring attendance in dangerous locales.

Cinemas and shopping malls were dying, anyway. So, too, cities? A way of thinking of this urban exodus is simply as a matter of economic obsolescence: What is generally the oldest and most decrepit segment of the housing stock is being abandoned.

That pushes up prices in the suburbs, don’t it? “Gimme land, lotsa land, under smoggy skies above – and don’t dance so close to me!”

I thought we were pushing the top of this market turn before Coronavirus hit. That foreign import was killing big cities even before the rioters started burning them down. Accordingly, there won’t be a top in Phoenix for a while, where March of 2020 may be the high-water mark for decades for many great American cities.

But the thing about market tops is, they advertise themselves: Rapid price jumps, low inventory, bidding wars, waived contingencies, escalator clauses, solemn pre-dawn ungulate sacrifices, etc.

Again, not there, but very much here – and everywhere suburban parcels abound.

Here’s another characteristic of market tops, one we were all very well paid to overlook in the housing bubble of this century’s toddler years:

The real estate market tops when even the most marginally-prepared borrowers compete for and get mortgages.

What’s a bubble? It’s when the bike messengers and coffee shop waitresses come down to Wall Street with their mattress money. Wait, that’s a dated image. How about this? A bubble is when lifelong renters become very temporary homeowners. No, that was the last time. Try this: A bubble is when forty-year-old adolescents emerge from mom’s basement just long enough to sign socially-distanced closing docs in a title company’s parking lot.

My point would be that, Read more

September 10, 2020

Overnight News: If your houses aren’t evaporating, your taxpayers are.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“What’s new, nu?”

Hoover Institution: California Businesses Leave The State By The Thousands.

Housing Wire: U.S. mortgage rates fall to all-time lows this week.

CNBC: The CDC banned evictions, but some renters are still vulnerable.

Forbes: What It Might Mean If We All Work From Home?

City Journal: What the Trump Eviction Ban Gets Wrong.

City Journal: New York City at the precipice: A Tale of Two Cities, Indeed.

CNBC: Manhattan rental market plunges, leaving 15,000 empty apartments in August.

And for hard-working grunts on the ground who have found a praxis that pays…

UPI: Virginia man buys 20 lottery tickets, wins 20 times.

September 9, 2020

Are big cities hostile to middle class values? Not to worry! Big Data will make it all worthwhile.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Imagine how cities will change after half their populations have fled.

Forbes today, and I shouldn’t pick on them. Some of their writers are interesting. Not here, though, I’m afraid.

Start wrong, stay wrong: What value has the big city provided, until now:

it has provided urban citizens with access to technology

In fact: Access to cheaper transportation of people, information and goods – most of which is now obviated by the internet – which would be the point demanding consideration.

But not here.

There are still many parts of the developed world where having a video call is difficult and starting an ecommerce business is impossible due to poor internet speeds.

And this has nothing to do with anyone reading Forbes. Got two bars on your phone? You’ve got what it takes to work from home.

Oh, but it’s not old-tech that matters. New-tech will require cities because… Why? The claims are all about economies of scale, but that’s pretty 19th-century thinking. In fact, new technology – like all innovation – goes where the money is. If the full-price early-adopters move to the exurbs, so will the people who hope to sell to them.

Am I wrong?

Take, for instance, self-driving vehicles. Autonomous vehicles require a massive infrastructure of live data feeds from cameras, GPRS, smart devices, infrared, Bluetooth and sensors in order to ensure that a car or drone can operate safely. These data feeds are not going to exist on country lanes and byways in rural areas.

Of course, all of that is daft. You can get four bars or better from any cell carrier, anywhere rich people go. Meanwhile, escaping the glaring, blaring distractions of urbanity is a key benefit of the exodus we are seeing.

What’s the downside to remaining in the big burgs?

Those who do live in cities will see a substantial degradation of their privacy rights as surveillance becomes a way of life.

I’m pretty sure getting mugged by gangs of Grasshoppers is going to turn out to be a bigger deal. Don’t worry, though. Virtual reality will give you something else to think about, as your wounds heal.

Why are people racing Read more

September 8, 2020

Unchained Melody: The DISC of “Darling Be Home Soon.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The original is pure Di, as are the lyrics: Busy musician home briefly imposes ardent deadlines. It’s truly great that way, an abrupt and demanding lust, and the sheer urgency rends fabric. Artie Schroeck did the original arrangements – and he’s there in all the covers.

Joe Cocker takes and remakes the song – just like always – turning it into the Si viscera of wide-open yearning.

Susan Tedeschi delivers the Joe Cocker vocal performance, but it is Derek Trucks who shows us how Cs the love in that lyric can be.

September 8, 2020

“We are easy prey” – Propositions Three and Seven by Richard Mitchell

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Propositions Three and Seven from The Graves of Academe by Richard Mitchell

 
In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is, as we all know, king. And across the way, in the country of the witless, the half-wit is king. And why not? It’s only natural, and considering the circumstances, not really a bad system. We do the best we can.

But it is a system with some unhappy consequences. The one-eyed man knows that he could never be king in the land of the two-eyed, and the half-wit knows that he would be small potatoes indeed in a land where most people had all or most of their wits about them. These rulers, therefore, will be inordinately selective about their social programs, which will be designed not only to protect against the rise of the witful and the sighted, but, just as important, to ensure a never-failing supply of the witless and utterly blind. Even to the half-wit and the one-eyed man, it is clear that other half-wits and one-eyed men are potential competitors and supplanters, and they invert the ancient tale in which an anxious tyrant kept watch against a one-sandaled stranger by keeping watch against wanderers with both eyes and operating minds. Uneasy lies the head.

Unfortunately, most people are born with two eyes and even the propensity to think. If nothing is done about this, chaos, obviously, threatens the land. Even worse, unemployment threatens the one-eyed man and the half-wit. However, since they do in fact rule, those potentates have not much to fear, for they can command the construction and perpetuation of a state-supported and legally enforced system for the early detection and obliteration of antisocial traits, and thus arrange that witfulness and 20-20 vision will trouble the land as little as possible. The system is called “education.“

Such is our case. Nor should that surprise anyone. Like living creatures, institutions intend primarily to live and do whatever else they do only to that end. Unlike some living creatures, however, who do in fact occasionally decide that there is something even more to be prized than their own survival, Read more

September 7, 2020

What’s the secret real estate pricing trick that makes homes sell faster, for more money? Honesty.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“Guile creates rancor and delay, ignoring the financial consequences, where an honest broker is a lifeboat in a sea of lies.”

Our story so far:

There are a zillion other things we do for sellers, but we are getting at the essence of what makes a listing move faster and for more money than its competition.

So: Every choice we make maximizes the seller’s interests, but for that reason every choice maximizes transparency and, for lack of better term, velocity of decision-making.

Translation: I make it as easy as possible for the buyer to commit to my listing.

How, specifically?

No guile.

Disclose everything, of course, but not in any way that’s tricky or cagey or coy. Every buyer’s fear in every transaction is getting taken. Obviously, I want to do everything I can to take that fear away, but even before that I want to make sure that I have done nothing to amplify that fear.

And what might you suppose is the fastest, easiest way to make a buyer wary of me and my new listing?

How about the listing price?

Oh, yes! The price is the most important, most powerful statement on your listing, and if it’s a lie, the whole listing is suspect and the house is one-down – at a minimum – before it even shows.

So what does a lying listing price look like?

Just like this: $299,900.

Is the house worth $300,000? Or $295,000? How to tell? Liar’s Poker: Offer $295,000 and see where they come back.

That back-and-forth takes time, even if you insist it does not cost the seller money. Worse, we start with mistrust and slap-box our way to bad will. That will make the repair negotiations fun.

I think that’s dumb. I despise guile, anyway, but its further fruits are even more rancid that the soul-sacrifice required by deception in the first place. You make an ugly first move and then Read more

September 7, 2020

Splendor on – and in spite of – Labor Day.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Labor Day is a holiday established by people who hate human productivity, who hate the human mind. It is a day set aside on the calendar to celebrate and sanctify indolence – and violence. Photo by: Karen Horton

This is me looking back on looking back on a Labor Day a long time ago. The first extract was written on Labor Day, 2005, as the City of New Orleans was demonstrating for all of us that dependence on government is a fatal error. The second extract was written a year or two before that. And the Labor Day I am talking about there was years before that. Even so, every bit of this is perfectly apposite to the world we live in now – more is the pity.

This is me from elsewhen. I think about this every year at Labor Day. I spent much of the weekend working on business planning issues, macro, micro and meta. I remember from the days when I had a job how much I relished long weekends, because I could build so much on vast tracts of uninterrupted time. I did a bunch of money work last week, but my weekend was virtually my own – to fill with the work that too often takes a back seat to money work. Off and on we had Fox News on in the office, and the whining, pissing and moaning was an effective counterpoint to my entire way of life. My world is where the Splendor is, no alternatives, no substitutions, no adulterations, no crybaby excuses:

The time of your life is your sole capital. If you trade that time in such a way that you get in exchange less than you really want, less than you might actually have achieved, you have deliberately cheated yourself. You have acted to your own destruction by failing to use your time to construct of your life what you want most and need most and deserve most. You have let your obsession or anger – over what amounts to a trivial evil in a world where people are shredded Read more

September 6, 2020

My take on fintech? Who doesn’t love a better pen? But: No rainmakers, no rain.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Click to embiggen.

I got a recruitment pitch from OfferPad the other day: Be an in-house listing agent for our fallback upsell team. This is not an honor, an oddity or an error; I’m in a database, that’s all. And: Fun for me to see, but not a temptation.

They’re fools to make agents 1040 employees, rather than 1099 independent contractors. For a second reason, 1040 employees are going to be the death of all corporate entities. But the first reason is in the headline: No rainmakers, no rain.

You can see they understand this simple fact: The pay plan is commission plus a draw, the scheme all corporate sales teams use to attract and retain dedicated plodders.

But straight commission sales separates closers from losers just like that, with zero management intervention. That’s why real estate brokers like it so much.

And I think that illuminates the folly of taking fintech seriously. Who doesn’t love a better pen – but who believes a better pen will make you a better persuader? Technology solves paperwork problems very well, and I would be more impressed with technology vendors if they put more attention there. (Hint: Title and escrow: Rich, ripe, ready.) Technology addresses people problems poorly – a fact it is perpetually incapable of discovering.

Brian Brady pointed out to me that lenders live on Realtor marketing. That’s not wrong, it’s reasonable. Title, escrow, inspectors, tradesmen and home-warrantors all depend on Realtor referrals, which they can farm out only because they have already surfaced the buyer, seller or investor. You can’t buy your date a cocktail until you have a date.

So it’s the other end of the food chain that concerns me – not fintech but leadgen. Realty.bots whose sole business is to get in front of your client before you can – so they can sell access to you – are not your friends.

For what it’s worth: Of the big-name iBuyers, Zillow’s solution to abandoned shopping carts seems best. Instead of using salaried and lawsuit-curious employees to upsell more lawsuit opportunities, pitch the now-useless “leads” to starving Realtors. For 35%! Who has the Read more

September 5, 2020

The sweet spot: Pricing real estate the guerrilla marketing way, to maximize the seller’s net – as soon as possible.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The sweet spot is the place on the bat that makes baseballs change zip codes.


I am a passionate lister, and I have argued forever that everything matters in the listing praxis – but nothing matters more than the listing price. And: As you may have noticed, I could go on forever about pricing, but there is one idea that matters to me above all others:

The sweet spot.

Deny me sports and gambling metaphors and I could not write, but metaphors inform by their manifestation: If you know your business – if you have a true empathy for the machine of your praxis – you know where the sweet spot is.

In real estate pricing, the sweet spot is here:

I arrive at a number that, when I see it, I say, “But of course.”

And at at the listing presentation, the seller says, “But of course.”

And on listing day, all the experienced Realtors working that area look at their hotsheets and say, “But of course.”

And the buyers who see that house on the first few days of the listing all say, “But of course.”

The sweet spot is the number that everyone knows is right-on-the-money, as soon as they see it.

What’s the benefit? A bird – or six – in the hand. If you hit the market in the sweet spot, your seller should have one or more excellent offers to work with right away. When you get the price just right, everyone knows they have to jump or miss out.

And the benefit of that is to surface the optimal offer. I believe that a well-represented home should incite multiple offers overs its first weekend on market. I list on Thursday early morning, just after midnite, to maximize my debut on saved searches – thus to invoke reactions like “Must see Saturday!” As I’ve noted, I disclose the state of play for cash, conventional and FHA offers in the Private Remarks (Realtor-only) section of the listing.

My objective is to identify the highest, safest, soonest offer. The FHA offers will all be higher, even allowing for the closing-cost contributions, but FHA borrowers often Read more

September 4, 2020

Unchained Melody: “Timing Is Everything” – except so is everything else.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is Garrett Hedlund, who played Patroclus in Troy, doing one of the gut-wrenching songs from Country Strong – which is free just now on IMBD.

I love the granularity and particularity of the images, but you get to see the song being improved in the movie:

They’re arriving at the lyrics used in the the Garrett Hedlund recording, which are a substantial improvement on the original:

I could cite a number of examples, but the one that stands out is Gwyneth’s turn:

Original: “I remember that day when we first met.”

Country Stronger: “I remember that day when our eyes first met.”

That’s how good poetry gets better, and that kind of focus on mission-critical improvements is how everything gets better.

September 3, 2020

Guerrilla real estate marketing for immediate results: How to be young, hungry – and compensated.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I did a Facebook Live show today with Judah Hoover and Joshua Weidman. I had a blast, and I hope I provided some benefit for the listeners.

Big takeaway: “How the heck did you waste another day without moving to Arizona?!?”

I talked a little bit about how I got started in real estate. Afterward, I dug through some old stuff to see how we were marketing in those days.

I was licensed in May of 2001. I interviewed with a few traditional brokers and decided they were all in the business of fleecing agents – this is still the case – so I put my license with an apartment locator instead. I didn’t need to get bilked out of my one deal every six months, I needed to learn how to sell.

So that’s what I did. Apartment communities will pay big money for referrals when they’re vacant enough, but I also did leases that paid me $25 or $50. It wasn’t about the money, it was about getting a lot of experience very fast.

I built the first of the web sites that have fed us over the years, and I used wicked-simple SEO and very-cheap, very-basic pay-per-click ads to make my own rain – and to cultivate my own garden with it.

The broker was a sweet, smart guy, but he thought he was in the business of papering over the past mistakes of Grasshoppers, thus to get them a fresh shot at a new mistake. My thinking was that busy Ants need a timesaver, so that’s what I sold. I attracted supremely-well-qualified people who paid more rent in communities that paid more commission – and I collected referral fees, in many cases, for folks I never even met in person. Now that’s brokerage!

We have always lived by Jay Conrad Levinson’s “Guerrilla Marketing” – maximum impact from minimum spend by cracking the actual marketing problem. The image is of a promo piece we were using in those days. The file was laser-printed 4-up on an 8-1/2×11″ sheet. The sheets were trimmed, then the stacks of paper were turned into Post-It pads with a self-adhesive Read more

September 2, 2020

Is “The Scarlet Pimpernel” the greatest real estate movie ever made?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Perhaps not. It’s more about the relocation process as such, rather than the boots on the ground house-hunting. Even so, “The Scarlet Pimpernel” has plenty to teach Realtors and their clients right now. For example? How to make your getaway without getting a haircut.

Seriously, this is a charming melodrama about a detestable epoch – which we have the misfortune of living through again.

Why should Realtors and lenders be talking to your clients about the perils of Marxism? So you don’t have to risk your life rescuing them later.

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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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