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August 12, 2011

Say “Cheese!” It’s time to play Business Card Monte

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

We’ve all seen them. The usual suspects on a line-up across a counter in an empty kitchen. Gathering dust on a convenient window sill. Spread out like an abandoned poker game on a dining table. Ah yes, the real estate business cards left behind at showings. Black, white, red, blue, cheap, shiny, standard issue, each one with a Friendly Neighborhood Expert (FNE) smiling earnestly or stupidly grinning, depending (see tiny mug shot, above). My clients notice them too and they kind of scowl over the line up. When I toss mine onto the pile they say, “Hmm. Yours is different.” At which point I flash my own killerwatt smile and say, “Because I am.” They grin back, we move along.

Business cards are pretty awesome when you think about it. Palm-sized advertisements that you can carry about. A potentially effective way to get your message across, but it seems mostly wasted in the world of real estate.

Recently I saw a business card that was left behind with a printed thank you message: “Thank you for allowing us to show your property.” That’s nice. The message was printed next to the full length image of Mr and Mrs FNE. I wonder if it would be useful to have a showing-specific business card, with space to write a note on it? “Love the floor plan!” “Great job with the kitchen.” “Sorry we accidentally let the cat out.” “What the hell is that smell?” You get my point. Someone more experienced can fill me in on why that would be a disastrous idea for their client.

I’ve had property-specific business cards printed up, that’s an easy item to hand across a threshold if you are door knocking, and I have all purpose business cards I use, (see blurry photo, below) they feature The Brick Ranch logo from my website, and it does stand out in a sea of tiny FNEs splashed across the Formica, but business cards are so cheap, why not have a few on hand for a multitude of purposes?

I remember Russell Shaw commenting on one of the BHB business card posts that your Read more

August 10, 2011

What could be worse than Uncle Sam as the nation’s mortgage monopolist? How about Uncle Sam the monopoly landlord?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From the Associated Press:

The Obama administration may turn thousands of government-owned foreclosures into rental properties to help boost falling home prices.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency said Wednesday it is seeking input from investors on how to rent roughly 250,000 homes owned by government-controlled mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration. All of the homes are foreclosures.

The U.S. government rescued the two mortgage giants in September 2008 and has funded them since the financial crisis. Fannie and Freddie own or guarantee about half of the nation’s mortgages and nearly all new mortgages.

Converting the homes into rentals may reduce “credit losses and help stabilize neighborhoods and home values,” said Edward DeMarco, acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie and Freddie.

Fannie and Freddie have been hoarding foreclosure inventory in Phoenix for months. Now I know why. Witness:

It also might meet the growing demand for rentals.

So would selling them, except then they would be owned and managed by people who are working for profit, not political functionaries.

But wait. There’s more:

Private investors could also be allowed to oversee the conversions.

That is to say, all the best Fed-friendly butt-buddies will be cut in on the graft.

And you thought the Federal government could not screw the housing market up any worse…

August 9, 2011

They don’t know them as the world’s most elite warriors.They know them as “Dad”.

by

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

The last 48 hours has been kind of a blur for me. My friend Gary Lundholm, who is a broker with about 160 agents in a couple of offices in Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA emailed me on Monday am with an unexpected need. (I am going to tell you more about Gary in a future post…he is a Bloodhound and his office is thriving in this economy).

The SEAL Team that was killed in the helicopter crash in Afghanistan was based in his area. Among the agents in his office are many Navy Veterans (Gary is as well.) and spouses of active duty personnel. He wanted to do something to help the families.

He purchased SEALKids.com and wanted a site built so that his agents could all help gather donations from the local community as well as the real estate community for the children of these fallen warriors. Their goal is lofty. $100,000 for the kids of these fallen soldiers. Starting tomorrow morning, they will be sending this online to their friends locally.

If you know Gary at all, this is exactly the type of thing he is known for. (He’d never admit that, which is further proof.) So for the last couple of days on and off, we put together a site to help be a collection for funds to be donated to the Navy SEAL Foundation which will go to aid the families, who often cannot ask for help because they need to protect their identities. It is a close knit community.

It has been an honor to donate some time to work on this. I have cried often as I thought of my own kids and as I have thought of these families’ sacrifices.

I am not asking for donations unless you have it and want to give. I AM asking that you share this around with others so that those who can and want to give have the opportunity. I gave. I would not have posted that unless I had. My family and I decided together that it was something we needed to do.

One more thing that I would ask Read more

August 9, 2011

Reasons to be cheerful: Defying the specter of ugly fates.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m kicking this back to the top from June, 2010. I had occasion to re-read my thoughts on sex earlier today, and then I went back and looked at this essay. I like it better today than I did last summer, and I hope you will, too. –GSS
 

Reasons to be cheerful, part zero: The ground we stand upon is firm and the lever of the human mind grows ever stronger.

I need to take this someplace else. I am madly off-topic here more often than not, this for the past couple of years. I think I may be in the third act of this spectacle of ideas I have made of my life, and I can’t even say, yet, if it’s a farce in three acts or a tragedy in five. I would prefer an epiphany, to say the truth, a symphony, a grand opera composed of nothing but the simplest and most obvious of abstractions, an idiot’s guide to what every last idiot among us has always known forever, has never once doubted, and has always, always betrayed — until now.

But that’s why I’m cheerful, I think, despite everything. There is still so much time left to us, amidst the crush of on-rushing events. I am thrice lucky, I know it: I can see and I can understand what I am seeing. I can think and I can transcribe my thoughts. And I live in a time when the thoughts of everyone in human history who ever thought productively are instantly available to each one of us — on demand, no charge, quantities unlimited, with every taste in depth and rigor satisfied and then some.

This is an amazing thing. It’s never happened before, and it remains to be seen how deeply humanity is willing to set its roots in the boundless praries of the mind. But the simple fact that this is possible — and that people all over the world are taking advantage of it — is a profoundly important reason to be cheerful, no matter what despair might be unearthed in the day’s events.

Clearly, Barrack Obama is incompetent. That’s Read more

August 8, 2011

Greco-Roman Rejection of Rotarian Socialism Is The Cure For What Ails the United States

by

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

Author website

Europe has tried all sorts of Statist approaches to the PIIGS problems.  Today, Europeans are considering “liberalization”:

As the European financial crisis moves into its next phase, there’s a new word to learn: “liberalization,” and it’s likely to be even more unpopular than “austerity.”

Leaders in Europe are promising to “liberalize” their economies in an effort to grow those economies, but they face an enormous wall of vested interests that don’t want anything to change.

Greg Swann talked about cutting regulations a year ago.  My comment:

There are close to 400 licensed occupations. Compile a list of half of them, introduce legislation that outlaws states (and Feds) to regulate any of these professions.  Repeat each quarter. Within a year, you’ll only have 25 regulated industries. Within two years, the unemployment rate will drop to 6%, and there will be some 2 million new businesses created

Ohmygosh, cut the licensing regulations?  Does that mean that someone, who hasn’t taken a 400-hour licensing course, will be charging money for weaving hair in their living room?  The horror.  How will the public ever be protected from bad hair-weavererers?  Reputation management is already happening in the free market.  Read Greg’s response:

Check. There’s more that can be done, much of it to the benefit of very small businesses. Consider this: When you’re trying to decide if you should take a chance on a restaurant, who do you trust more, a city inspector who may be on the take or nine fiercely independent Yelpers? The dollar cost of preventing injuries that almost never happen is half of our economy — which is nothing compared to the opportunity costs and interest value of those lost opportunities. We’ve got a dinghy loaded up with admirals and we can’t figure out why it’s slowly sinking.

Who then would stand in the way of  “liberalization”?  Let’s go back to the CNBC article:

Leaders in Europe are promising to “liberalize” their economies in an effort to grow those economies, but they face an enormous wall of vested interests that don’t want anything to change.

Take the case of Simon Galina, a 38-year-old taxi driver in Rome. His profession is one Read more

August 7, 2011

A practical governing strategy for the Republican party. It won’t happen, but at least it’s potentially doable, unlike everything else.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[Back to the top from November 3, 2010. –GSS]
 

Here’s what the Republicans won last night, most probably: The opportunity to be left holding the bag if the whole creaking kleptocracy crashes.

Here’s what they mostly can’t do, at least not right away: Cut spending or taxes. A huge and growing portion of the budgets at all levels of government are entitlement payments — a subsistence dole under various labels. We have taken a once-free people and turned it half-predator, half-prey — often with both halves living under one scalp, amazingly enough.

So what can Republicans actually do, right now, to deliver on their promises?

They can eliminate every form of business regulation, at all levels of government.

Civil court has always been more than adequate to deal with actual injury. Not coincidentally, statutory regulation is always anti-economic nonsense: Banning competitors (as with the real estate licensing laws), government make-work, monkey-see-monkey-do, superstition, ossified tradition, power lust, etc. If no one is getting hurt, what is being regulated out of existence is this: Human intelligence.

That’s significant for two reasons: We need for business people to get to work and to take a bunch of us along with them. If we decriminalize human intelligence, at least partially, it’s reasonable to expect to see more of it — to everyone’s benefit. But even without the innovations we currently forbid in many businesses and industries, business people need to be able to plan for the future. If they are constantly subject to a vast, unknowable array of ever-changing regulations, they will not take risks. This is news to no one.

So: I’m not talking about some kind of “temporary moratorium” on regulation. This is an old, old leftist dodge: If the cows start to look scrawny, let them fatten up a little before you take up the slaughter again. Alas, because Republicans often have no firmly-held philosophical principles, they fall for these stunts again and again — as with the Bush tax “cuts.”

No, what is needed is the complete eradication of regulation: Repeal the enabling legislation, pay off and dismiss the staff, liquidate the chattel- and real-property. (All of this will Read more

August 7, 2011

It’s not enough for the tea party movement to throw the bums out. To contain the federal government, we have to cut its powers.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[Back to the top from January 21, 2010. –GSS]
 

What a delight it is that the citizens of Massachusetts have risen up against the federal leviathan. All across the country, the tea party movement is furiously aboil, angry Americans anxiously awaiting the opportunity to pull some levers in a voting booth.

But if the current populist uprising is nothing more than yet another throw-the-bums-out movement, it will come to nothing. We threw the bums out good and hard in 1994, and yet the federal leviathan has done nothing but grow since then. By now the national government is so huge that it threatens to crush the nation and its people and productive plant beneath its enormous weight.

It is not enough to throw the bums out. To contain the federal government, we have to cut its powers. Nothing else will stop its long-term growth.

The United States was originally conceived of as a confederation of sovereign states. The states joined together for those common purposes that seemed to make sense to them, with each state retaining is sovereignty in all other matters.

That was the theory — the federal government was to be the hand-servant of the states. In practice, the federal government has usurped the power of the states from the very beginning, with the abuses becoming more bold and more comprehensive with each passing decade.

This turns out to have been a mistake — as we are discovering. Where each state is independent of all the others, each one can try different policies. The states can become the laboratories of democracy that the founding fathers envisioned.

But to achieve this, we will have to rein in the federal leviathan. The states and the people need to reassert their ownership of and control over the national government.

How? By constitutional amendment. Probably by constitutional convention, since it seems unlikely that sitting members of Congress will vote to circumscribe their awesome and terrifying powers.

But here, in a very short summary, is what needs to be done, if the head of steam built up by the tea party movement is not to be wasted. The text within the quotation marks Read more

August 7, 2011

A strategy for the Republican party that can actually win elections

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[Back to the top from November 6, 2009. –GSS]
 

The national Republican party is riven by an insuperable internal contradiction.

Out of one side of their mouths, Republicans wish to portray themselves as tax cutters, red-tape slashers, champions of liberty fearlessly hacking away at the slimy tentacles of the leviathan state. Ignore for the moment that they’re spineless jellyfish when it comes time to cut, slash or hack; this is how they wish to present themselves.

Out of the other side of their mouths, Republicans offer American voters an alternate set of slimy tentacles for the same old leviathan. The state they promise to shrink will simultaneously promote a nebulous family values agenda and forbid abortion. Republicans will simultaneously dismantle the Department of Education and supplant ecosocialist indoctrination with theocratic indoctrination. The leviathan state will lose the power to ban cancer drugs but gain the power to ban rap records.

Things fall apart. The center cannot hold…

Whatever the Republican party seeks to be in the states, in the counties, in the towns, what it cannot be at the national level is the party of both smaller and larger government. It can’t because as a strategy it makes no sense, and it can’t because there is no common ground between the liberty-seeking Republicans and the theocracy-seeking Republicans. Those two wings of the party can only fly apart in the long run.

But: There is a way around this: The Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

If the national Republican party were to concentrate solely on shrinking the Federal leviathan to a strict adherence to the Constitution, devolving all of the usurped tentacular powers to the states to do with — or do away with — as they choose, the party could achieve these goals:

  • It would actually deliver on a promise, prompting universal amazement.
  • It would present to both of its contradictory wings the opportunity to achieve at the state and local levels what they cannot hope to achieve nationally.
  • It would result Read more
August 3, 2011

A demonstration of the value of VirtualOmniscience.com: “I don’t remember offhand what I was doing last Tuesday, but this does not automatically lead me to assume I was gang-raped.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Ann Coulter gets a bad rap, I think. She is a demagogue, a dirty-pool artist, a Menckenesque presence in the public prints. But she is not a rhetor, a champion of pure debate. Rather, she is a satirist, and she is damn good at it. The shrieking she incites seems like so much group-glowering to me, whipped up, I expect, by people who know that a chorus of grievances, no matter how loud or plaintive, is not an argument.

Tonight she brings us a problem near-omnipresent video can easily solve: False accusations of rape:

Having showcased Jones’ original, false accusation in a 1,500-word article splashed across its front page, as soon as her story unraveled, the Times stared at its shoes and said nothing. In another six months, liberals will once again be citing Jones’ case as evidence of the “troubling trend” of sexual assaults among military contractors.

If only Jones had accused Bill Clinton or any member of the Kennedy family of rape, the mainstream media might have treated her allegations with a little more skepticism. But she accused employees of a company with a tertiary, long-ago, six-degrees-of-separation relationship with Dick Cheney. This was no time for journalistic integrity.

Still, wasn’t it the tiniest bit suspicious that Jones claimed KBR management responded to her rape claim by locking her in a shipping container?

Why would a company that already had a PR problem stick its neck out to protect accused rapists? Isn’t it more likely that a corporation would sell out even innocent employees accused of rape? Wouldn’t it have occurred to them that she’d eventually get back to the U.S.?

None of this could happen if there were video cameras everywhere and on everyone, and if the captured video were stored forever. No need for visual interpretation or database mining. Just a permanent record of everything that happens, for anyone to view in real time or review later. This is the omniscience we have always wanted from our gods, the irrefutable information necessary to correct injustices. But by making it an omni-omniscience — everyone has the capacity to observe anything they want to see — Read more

August 3, 2011

Defining Deals, Debts and Deficits

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’

Through the Looking Glass. 

Apropos of nothing, when you use the word CUT, what do you choose it to mean? 

Courtesy of the Cato Institute

August 2, 2011

iPad observation #8: The death of mediocrity and, along with it, the death of contempt for the consumer

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m kicking this back to the top from February of 2010, when the iPad had just been announced. In another of the posts in this series, I wrote: “The implication of a computer that can train its end-users how to use it is that teaching as a profession is dead. All teaching, at all levels. Just imagine what the iPad could do for you if you really wanted to learn a foreign language…” Technology is giving us the power to disintermediate vast numbers of state employees. No telling if we will actually do it, but it is by now eminently doable. This essay addresses that kind of disruption in the Rotarian Socialist marketplace. –GSS

 
I don’t know if I’m ready for this yet, but I need to get it out there where I can take a look at it. Discursive prose is thinking, first, not communication, and this is a big idea. It’s possible I’ll have to return to it again and again to make it completely pellucid, but I promise to do my best today.

So: One of the events the introduction of the iPad foretells is the death of mediocrity in the marketplace, and, along with it, the death of the kind of endemic contempt for the consumer that results in mediocre products and services.

Why would this be so? We’ll get to that, but indulge me long enough to discuss what is — the world as we live in it now — before we take up what is to come.

Why doesn’t the caps-lock key work properly on any Windows keyboard? When you have the caps-lock key down and you then type the “a” key while holding the shift key down, why do you get an “a” instead of an “A”? Surely when you typed shift-“a”, what you wanted as an “A”, not an “a”. Why has this always been broken on all Windows machines, and on all DOS machines before that?

The answer to those questions is quite simple. It’s because Microsoft has never once cared enough to get this right. It’s been wrong for decades in Windows, right for decades on Read more

August 1, 2011

Get rich fighting crime! Save the girl — and make big money doing it — by correcting one simple error in your thinking.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The pitch…

That’s a sweet offer in the headline, don’t you think? It’s like Batman meets Ironman, but it’s all real — achievable now, no super-human powers required.

Not enough? You want more?

How’s this?

I can show you how to all-but-eliminate every sort of street crime.

I can show you how to protect any real estate or personal property you own from theft, mayhem, mishap or from simple maintenance oversights.

I can show you how to resolve almost every kind of civil dispute — without courts, without attorneys — and usually without rancor.

I can show you how to perfect your sales praxis to an amazing state of efficiency.

Hell, I can even increase your chance of successfully hooking-up at the singles bar.

I can cut your commute time, maximize your work-day productivity and save you from getting Aunt Whatshername’s name wrong when you see her.

Watch me: I can show you how to create a brand new trillion-dollar industry that will spin off dozens of start-ups as it is aborning and hundreds more later on.

I can show you how to mine an incredible new source of vast, uncountable wealth, a source no one has ever thought of before. I can put you there, at the dawn of a new age of human productivity — a pioneer, a prospector, and ultimately a tycoon in a brand new way of making money.

As you gaze upon that incredible motherlode of riches — knowing that there are unfathomable trillions more buried within it — I have one simple question to ask you:

To gain access to those riches — no fear of crime, no more petty lawsuits, better closing skills on and off the job, plus hundreds of new businesses, each one throwing off astounding new opportunities — would you be willing to correct one simple error in your thinking?

Are you willing to consider the proposition? Stay tuned…

 
The moth, the cat and the ontological nature of error…

Oh, good grief! Was there a fifty-cent word in that subhead?

There was, alas.

The good news is that, if you can hang in there, and if you have the guts to change a fundamental error in your thinking, I Read more

July 29, 2011

Could Mortgage Rates DROP after a Treasuries’ credit ratings downgrade?

by

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

Author website

The dictated debt limit deadline looms and a credit rating downgrade, to US Treasury securities and agency mortgage-backed securities, seems likely.  Naturally, a spike in treasury yields is expected and a subsequent rise in mortgage rates should follow.   That’s right out of the senior year textbook, in most American business schools.

I’m not so sure the fixed-income markets will follow the textbook.  Mortgage rates might … do nothing in response the the credit rating downgrade.  Here’s why:

The credit ratings agencies lack……well…credibility.

The independent credit ratings agencies ( Moodys, Standard & Poors, Fitch, etc) have a reputation for being late on the scene.  They got hoodwinked with Enron, MCI/Worldcom, and Greece.  They were asleep at the wheel during the mortgage meltdown, issuing AAA ratings to CDOs, up until late 2007.  They are often considered to be too chummy with the issuers (the issuers pay their fee) and when the issuer is a government (with the power to regulate their business), they generally walk on eggshells.

The news may be baked into the market already.

The ratings agencies have been signaling a potential downgrade for months.  Clearly, raising the US debt limit will allow the Treasury to remain “liquid” but the agencies have said a downgrade is likely unless a substantive plan is enacted to reduce spending.  Cut, Cap & Balance, the “most extreme” of the proposals offered, still might not have been “extreme” enough to avoid a downgrade.  Both political parties are demonstrating that they lack the political will to address the long-term structural deficits, needed to bolster the Federal budget, to avoid the ratings downgrade.  Fixed income traders seem to be shrugging that off.

US Treasury securities are still considered to be the safest investment in the world.

Certainly there are better run countries than the US but their debt offerings lack SIZE; there ain’t enough of that debt for the real money.  Germany has its EU obligations hanging around in the background and Japan seems to be in worse shape than we are.  Chinese sovereign debt could be a consideration but the Chinese and Japanese still want their investments dollar-denominated.  The US is, for all Read more

July 27, 2011

In the land of the free it might be too hot to go up (in flames) on the roof, but it’s always cool when you have an air conditioner cosy.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Since becoming a property manager in March, I’ve added some new hats to my collection: I am, like it or don’t, a bill collector and a tax collector. As of today, I am on the road to becoming an evictor, as well. I’m phlegmatic about all of this. I may not love those roles, but I freely contracted to take them on, and I have done them creditably, I think. Even so, I’m in the mood for a palate cleanser.

So: Here are some real estate photos I took this week:

Can’t figure out where to store those pesky spare gas cans? The whole roof is just sitting up there empty. We might-could build a dog run up there, too!

New in Phoenix this week: The official Aunt Fannie and Uncle Freddie® brand air conditioner cosy. It’s the perfect closing gift, but why wait until Close of Escrow to buy it?

However: Style is style and fashion is fashion, so here’s a somewhat different look:

Form follows function. If we can’t put looters in jail, we have to put ourselves and our things in jail instead. But that doesn’t mean we can’t put gas cans on our roofs, dadgummit! This is still a free country, after all…

Well.

That doesn’t feel much better…

Here’s The White Stripes to change the subject entirely:

What’s the song about? It’s a break-up song, but we read it as a discussion of the most enthralling real estate of all.

And now I feel better.

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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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