There’s always something to howl about.
Today, you will need to buy this book.
Because it has been the one thing that’s been key to the run I’ve been on. To understanding who I am.
To go pro.
Every idea I’ve implimented has come from this book – or from the Meditations (hays translation).
Anyway, even if you’re broke and mad at the world, go get this book. I’ve read it 5 times, I think. I could stand to read it 50 more.
My vote: “I don’t get it. This stunt always used to work with my Gammy.”
The above video is getting thousands of views – best we can tell it’s at 2500 but as is their norm, youtube stops it at key points and it catches up later. Anyway, we’re in the top 50 for nonprofit today.
If you guys can – and we hope you can – it would be truly great if you’d visit that and comment on it. Comments are a currency yotubue loves.
Howdy Bloodhounds. Not a lot to say in the real estate world because I’be been working on the After Effects Demo Shop, Simplifilm.Com.
The Foundation for a Free Society commissioned us to make a video. So, obviously, we did. This one owes an homage to the clear thinking of Greg Swann (along, of course with Bastiat)
We make demo videos and we’re priced in the lower five figures per finished, written, voiced and rendered minute. This piece isn’t really representative of what we’re doing, but it fits the conversations that we’ve had here. It’s probably the last political thing we’ll do for a great long while. We’re immensely proud of it.
I can say for certain if Greg hadn’t provided some of the vocabulary it wouldn’t have been as good as it it is. Help the Foundation for a Free Society and give them some money. They are locked in and loaded, competent and winning. (Disclosure: some of their money might come back to us in the form of a video, but we assure you: we charged them less per minute – by 1/3 -than anyone else will ever pay).
MSNBC is planning to run a story next week on me, as part of a story about how lawyers are coping with a bad economy.
And I’ve been able to grow: I added my wife in January, who has been able to expand the firm’s business. We hired a new lawyer, a former prosecutor, who started in early May and is adding to our ability to expand into neighboring counties, as well as traffic law and bankruptcy law.
I’ve also started a redesign of my website. I’d appreciate your feedback. I recognize your time is valuable. In exchange for your feedback, I will randomly select someone to receive a $100 gift certificate to Amazon.com.
It’s entirely anonymous – you’ll have to trust me that someone got the gift certificate – and confidential. No one but me will know you sent me feedback. And no one will know if you win the gift certificate.
My new front page is at www.chetson.com/home. Please only review that page. Don’t worry about clicking through to the rest of the site which has not yet been redesigned.
Because the prettiest designs don’t always work on every browser, or are confusing, I’d like your frank feedback:
Feel free to email me your feedback to dchetson@gmail.com. Anyone who emails me by Wednesday, June 15, is eligible for the $100 gift certificate.
Thanks for your help!
I’ve been having periodic, kinda sorta regular conversations with a young real estate agent in the southwest. It’s been goin’ on for maybe a year or more. He thinks he has a very bright future, but from where I sit, he hasn’t yet grasped just how really good he’s destined to be.
He’s a goal setter, yet he’s not hit his goals the last few years. Don’t get me wrong, he’s done very well. But missin’ his goals consistently isn’t from poor work ethic, he’s like a Nebraskan corn farmer at harvest time. The guy’s relatively tech savvy as he maintains his own websites, which are designed to be lead generators. He has an IDX etc. Still, goals not met.
He works his ass off, gets referrals up the ying-yang, follows up, crosses his T’s, dots his I’s, loves his mom, and eats his veggies. So what’s the hold up for Heaven’s sake? What’s been missing?
95% (Pulled out of the clean, breezy San Diego blue sky.) of real estate agents who don’t make it, fail for this reason.
Promise you won’t roll your eyes.
Bottom line? He stopped spending so much time with websites, and other various marketing tasks, and began spending most of his time either prospecting or, you know, being belly to belly with folks who could tell him to go to hell. Turns out a buncha folks attached to said bellies haven’t been giving him directions to Satan’s abode.
Go figure.
His income this year will most likely eclipse last year’s goal by about 30% or more — a goal he failed to reach. Puttin’ it another way, If he reaches this year’s goal, and he’s ‘this close’ to being on target, he’ll have exceeded last year’s actual income by approximately 55-70%. All this by simply parkin’ his belly in front of more stranger’s bellies than ever before.
Who’d a thunk?
Oh, and for the record, so far this year his ‘high tech’ lead generators have produced a tad less than 20% of his income. The dominating majority of what he’s accomplished has been using methods available when Truman was in Read more
Steve Jobs is going to do the keynote presentation at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference tomorrow. Surely part of his motivation is to show Apple’s shareholders that he is still in charge. But Jobs wouldn’t be doing this if Apple didn’t have some cool new toys to show off.
Systems designer Kevin Fix speculates about what might be on the agenda:
I get the feeling that the announcements at next week’s Apple WWDC are going to represent the same kind of fundamental shift in Apple’s offering that the iPod did in 2001.
I don’t have any inside info, and I make a point of not trying to pry secrets from my friends who work at Apple, but the rumblings are huge. ‘iCloud’ could mean anything, but given the complete failure of MobileMe over the last decade there’s no way Apple would introduce it on such a pedestal unless it’s incredible. My guess is that iCloud is to MobileMe as iPhone was to Newton: a complete, deep, polished solution after an underwhelming market failure.
Apple took a long time to get the Internet. Geeks were still installing FTP clients and web browsers for years after Apple belatedly included TCP/IP and PPP to their OS and, when Apple finally did integrate the Internet into Mac OS, it was in a very tacked on kind of way. A browser, an app for making web pages, eventually a few vertical online stores. I think that’s all about to change.
The scene has been building for a long time: The iPhone blurred the line between using a local device and being online. Chromebooks propose to eliminate the line completely by using an OS that expects to be online all the time (though still has limited functionality when the wireless cord is cut). Dropbox is a huge hit because it provides the most seamless way to use native apps while still writing to the cloud. Google and Amazon are tripping over each other (and the music labels) trying to roll out virtual music lockers.
My guess though is that these vertical solutions will seem pretty thin by the end of next week.
What, specifically, Read more
Initial observations about the iPad
Admittedly, I am a fan of electronic gadgets that promise to either make my life easier or make my life more fun. That being said I was very skeptical about the iPad when it was announced. I had made up my mind that the Microsoft Courier was going to be the device that was going to rock my world. Well Apple shipped and Microsoft slipped and I was left clutching at the vapor.
Flash forward to May 2011 since I live in the shadow of Redmond I had to make sure that the Great Eye of Gates did not see me enter the Temple of Jobs. I put on my disguise and I slipped into the Apple Store in the Tacoma Mall. I was greeted by a freshly scrubbed face wearing white tennis shoes. I was so surprised by the neat, clean and very well stocked store that almost dropped the Dixie Cup of Kool Aid that was offered to me.
I was allowed to quietly browse the products offered and was quite impressed with the offerings. I was looking for a 16 gig Wi-Fi iPad and I was politely told that they were out of that model. The salesperson offered to take my name and contact information and would notify me when they received one in stock. Terrified that my contact information would somehow slip into the wrong hands I quickly made my exit from the store. Two days later the draw was too strong. I slipped back into the store and quickly exited with a 16-gig 3g model. That moment might just be the transcendent moment in my real estate career.
Taking the iPad home closing the blinds and turning off all computers running any Microsoft products so that my actions could not be traced to the mother ship in Redmond I opened the box and removed the glowing (ok the screen glows not the actual device) iPad. We have been inseparable since.
Currently I am using my iPad for the following real estate activities:
• Email: my Exchange email account was quickly and efficiently configured and setup Read more
What are you going to do about it?
For the record, after a totally killer April, allowing for leases and property management fees, I made zero dollars and zero cents in May. Some days the bear eats you…
Steve Jobs in Forbes. One of the most hateful precepts of socialism is the idea of existential equality. We are all equal politically, but in the things we do with our lives we are very different. The world we live in is much richer because Jobs is alive now, too. We will be poorer when he shuffles off this mortal coil. The best thing we can do — for ourselves, for our businesses and in tribute to the best the human mind can achieve — is to learn to think as Steve Jobs thinks.
I’ve had a string of successes lately. May will mark the end of the 7th month of growing income. In a row. For a salesperson that surfs the payables (thanks, Greg for that phrase), it’s a joy to be there. I’m also cheating: October was the most brutally bad month I’ve had- it might have been $500.00 net, and it took till January or Feb to recover from that.
I’ve hardly “arrived,” during this time I’ve put on about 17 pounds (despite going to the gym pretty regularly – the battle at the dinner table has been met poorly by me, and that changes Wednesday with a physician supervised 90 day commitment with a variant of the Paleo diet.) I’m on the cusp of paying the monster IRS debt that I acquired in my 20’s. On the cusp means July to those scoring at home.
My wife has suffered from the madness of depression during this time (something I’ve struggled with, and it’s true madness), and there are the usual excuses and resistances that exist. But I’ve done stuff to compensate for the Resistance. And I’m sharing this with you.
I’m also gonna say that I’ve doubled my income and left about 25% of my “hours worked” behind. I am working harder, when I’m working, and making a deliberate effort to refresh myself at the wellspring (more on that in a bit).
In any case, let’s talk about the “how” behind this. A series of simple change that, taken together, have made for profound growth. This year will have a higher income than last year. These habits- below- are why. Each could get a bigger blog post or treatment.
Daily Read: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. I read about 3-5 pages from this each day. I’m a believer in Christ. Still the way that this is laid out speaks to me, Scriptures for my thinking and has changed my behavior. To the point: I don’t have prickly little testy spats with people because I leave them to most of their own bullshit. I can ignore much, easily. I don’t need to inform the Read more
If I was going to create a soundtrack for #rppsi, (and why wouldn’t I?), it would have to include the dark and disturbing world of Mack the Knife.
Nick Cave, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and Lotte Lenya stick it to us. Enjoy the pain.
Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL
…this is how business might be done:
You (a willing home seller) would look for a real estate agent and discover that the government mandates that you hire, its delegated agent, to market and negotiate on your behalf. That chosen agent will be the only one who can deal with potential buyers and will select which offer you should consider, among the many offers available. The agent presents the offer, to which you suggest a counter-offer or refusal.
In this hypothetical example, the agent tells you that you don’t have the option to counter and reminds you that you have a binding contract with her as an exclusive agent; she says “Take the ‘reasonable’ offer or suffer the consequences”. Obviously, you don’t think that’s fair and want to test the free market. You might consider another real estate agent because you don’t think she’s negotiating on your behalf.
Rather than allow you to pursue your own course of action, the real estate agent accuses you of “agent busting”. She sets up a picket line, in front of your home, with big signs proclaiming you to be “evil” or responsible for “unfair tactics”, or “greedy”. She turns away all potential buyers of the home by calling them “scabs” and proclaiming that a reasonable enough offer was on the table and you were just an evil, greedy agent buster.
She might convince the power company to sever your electricity, phone and internet. She might try to prevent the grocery store, pizza delivery guy, landscapers, and pool maintenance guy from servicing you, per your standing contract with them. Finally, she might try to restrict your income by hampering your ability to work .
You’re a tough cookie, though. It’s your home. You bought it, improved it, kept it clean, and want the best price a willing buyer might pay you. You hold out, regardless of the wacky protesters, bused in from out-of-town, screaming at you, your children, your neighbors, and anyone who might dare speak with Read more
This is a response to Robert Worthington’s post on getting to the next level selling real estate.
I don’t want to represent myself as an expert on production, this for two reasons:
First, because I know that is untrue. I’m a good real estate agent, and I think I’m becoming a good salesman. But if I stand on my tippy-toes, I can almost see over the nap of the carpet. I’m thinking there might a be a world up there.
And second, because I hate it when other people do it. It’s grating when they actually can ride the bull and nauseating when I find out that they can’t — that they’re all hat and no cattle.
With that as a caveat, I have some observations.
Here are three ways to net more income from your working hours:
1. Close more houses at your current gross commission income.
2. Close the same number of houses at a higher GCI.
3. Cut your costs.
Obviously, number 3 works great no matter what else you do, provided that cutting your costs doesn’t cut your production along with it. Marketing is what you communicate, not what you say, and half-assed marketing is worse than no marketing.
Scott Gaertner, a long-time friend of BloodhoundBlog and one of the highest-grossing/highest-netting agents I know, has urged us to pursue plan number 2. I want to do this, and I really, really want for Cathleen to do this, but the time is not propitious for listing luxury homes. In Phoenix — as in Florida, I expect — the inventory consists of lender-owned homes, short sales and the rare, and almost always over-priced, equity sale. I’ll talk about these categories further down, but the bottom line is that, for now, we don’t have either the cash or the resources to pursue the rare motivated equity seller. We can’t afford to acquire that client, and we really can’t afford to fail to close the sale.
I have a lot of respect for plan number 1, because I am a high-D. I like to get things done, and the more things I get done, better and faster, the happier I am in Read more
I’m going to turn 30 in september. I wonder to this day, when will my real estate business take off? I see wildy successful people like Russell Shaw. I even see Greg Swann’s goal of 1k a day. Truthfully, I wish I was up to $200 a day. The game is hard in Florida, but that’s why I’m in the fight, it’s a challenge filled with some heart ache and infinite fun. So far this year, I’ve made a decent wage, but nothing to brag about. I have kids and a stay at home wife, so you do the math. I’ve always said to myself, if I could just be self employed and pay the bills, I’ll have it made.
I wake up some days and do the typical routine and think, how on Earth can I hit it big in this business. Where’s my break going to come in. I work literally 7 day’s a week. Yet my fellow bloodhounder Greg Dallaire works 30 hours a week and is averaging $500 a day. I ask myself, where has my business plan failed? Well it hasn’t failed, but it’s not where I want to be. I’m doing something wrong and I don’t know what it is. I don’t want to work the rest of my life 7 days a week and make $200 a day.
What have you done in your business to take it to the next level? Oh I know, times are tough, but lets face it, I’m doing something wrong and not talking to enough people is what it comes down to. I need to be better at generating leads and handling them properly. So how can I get there. SEO blah blah, I’m doing it everyday and yes it’s paid off. I suck at recruiting agents. How do I recruit agents?
You see, I have a great wife, great kids, I sleep good at night, and I even love real estate, it’s a beautiful thing; but I want the beautiful real estate thing to be like Miss America. I want to step it up.
1)Can someone please help a fellow bloodhounder Read more
