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April 16, 2011

When all you have are fangs, everything looks like an artery

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

I’m so glad that the NAR leaders took the time to present the Town Hall meeting. It was both informative and educational and I learned quite a bit about the NAR, how they really function as an organization, and what they hope to accomplish with the Realtor Party. Ya know, the NAR leaders who took the time to prepare and present this Town Hall seem like really nice folks who truly believe in what they are saying, and I believe them when they say it really is about survival, but their solutions are based on what they’ve done in the past, and what they’ve done in the past is look at taxpayers, politicians, and members, as dinner.

Some of my favorite quotes:

“It’s the few of us who are pulling everybody else along. A few of us are making and allowing people to stay in business because of our RPAC donations. It’s time that everybody gives… We need to make this fair for everybody and everybody needs to share in what we do at NAR.”

In other words, “we need your blood in order to survive”. Something doesn’t quite follow, though. If I’m forced to join the NAR in order to be a member of the MLS, how am I being unfair to the NAR because I’m not a willing participant in their RPAC political blood-sucking initiatives?

Speaking of those political initiatives…

“(The NAR has) over a million members… about 900,000 of them don’t stand up and charge when we say charge.”

Oh. Well. I do beg your pardon. And yet, even with such a lamentably small number of  foot soldiers willing to do their bidding, (Dear NAR- instead of looking at us as sheeple, perhaps you should consider upping your own UVP) the NAR proudly proclaims all the fine work it did in pushing for the cannibalizing Home Buyer Tax Credit. That was good for the temporary survival of Realtors, not so good for home buyers who may have paid more for their homes than they otherwise would have if the market had been allowed to work itself out and, especially not so good for taxpayers who have just flushed more than half a billion dollars down the commode Read more

April 15, 2011

The Santa Claus Nation

by

Realtor, Renaissance Man

Author website

I love Christmas…just so you know. And no, I’m not on drugs, this being just past the start of Spring. But it occurred to me today that we are becoming a Santa Claus nation. Let me explain.

It all started when I read that the U.S. Post Office had just issued a stamp that depicts the Statue of Liberty. The story indicated that the picture of the Statue of Liberty was not actually the real one, but rather a photo of the Statue of LIberty in Las Vegas! Of course, when I read the article, I assumed that this mistake would make the stamp valuable, and that the real Statue would quickly replace the fake one. But….

The United States Postal Service admitted the mistake but said it planned to stick with its Lady Liberty “Forever” stamp.  “We still love the stamp design and would have selected this photograph anyway,” Roy Betts, a post office spokesman, told the Times.

 
Really? While I happen to love the movie “Miracle on 34th Street”, and am delighted each time I watch it, I’m no longer 6 years old, and (spoiler alert) understand the difference between Christmas and Santa Claus. Can’t wait for December? Want a reminder?

http://youtu.be/uFpX0arnPqc

The difference between Christmas and Santa Claus just doesn’t seem to have been clarified to our government, the Post Office for example, does it? What we’re now going to get is a depicture of a depicture. A replica of the real thing. They’re giving us Santa Claus. I want Christmas.

This is really a post about government in general, of course, NAR specifically, and an awful lot of the world we’ve colorized in attempt to feed the masses chaff instead of grain. I’m a man who was once a boy, working in a profession run by boys who never act like men, in a country where our government now openly promotes imitation over the real deal. If you’re on the street today showing homes, and if you come upon an old woman with wrinkles, look away. Somewhere there’s a Photoshopped Gravatar Read more

April 14, 2011

Approbation Junkies

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

I wonder, with regard to an addiction to things, if there isn’t a deeper cause… maybe a hole that needs filling. I ascribe most of our eventual attacks on ego to a lack of continuity we create within ourselves, and our inability to either align our external actions or accept our internal truth.

Sean Purcell commented here, not long ago.  Good stuff.  I wanted to bring it to the forefront.

Here’s the thing: needing approbation from others has made me weaker than anything else.  It’s made me a pawn of a dilettante, a hustler for a buck and it’s made me do all of the smarmy, seedy things I’ve ever done.   The root cause has been making someone like me.

Think of this: when you’ve gone to a store with a big ticket item, and you get an ingratiating, smarmy salesperson there.  His goal in life is to make you like him.  Is there anything more repulsive?   You see a car salesperson that wants you to seem like a friend.  Is anyone fooled by the saccharine compliments?  Anyone?

And if they convince you that you need to approve of them, you leave with a bad taste in your mouth, not unlike bile.  I’ve been that guy, on both sides of the counter.  I know.

It’s like going into a gentleman’s club, as if some dude in his late 40’s is gentrified by ogling daddy issue girls in their early 20’s.

Approbation is carbon monoxide.  Seeking it in lieu of achievement means a death of a million cuts.

The Oatmeal has it right.

Jesus, also, has it right:

“So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full.  (Matthew 6:2)

And what a reward.  Seriously.  What a reward to have dirtbags approve of you.

We clamor for it…the approval of strangers….(or in the case of Real Estate conferences, strangers that cheat on their wives.)  A standing ovation devoid of meaning?  We haven’t achieved jack, but we want the adulation anyway.  We do so much pandering.

To Read more

April 12, 2011

Two old soldiers in the wired world of real estate — Jott.com and the Flip video cameras — are shuffling off to the hi-tech graveyard.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve loved Jott.com since it was introduced. I use it every day — mainly to send reminders to myself, but also as my primary interface into Google Calendar. No more. Jott ends five years of gamely trying to get people to understand its value on May 3rd.

A lesser cause for mourning, Cisco flipped the switch on the Flip video camera line today. Frankly, I’ve been waiting for this for a while. The best idea Flip had was easy integration into YouTube — a feature your phone has by now, I should expect. Meanwhile, we switched almost all of our video to our Panasonic Lumix point-and-shoot cameras as soon as we got them.

The first BloodhoundBlog Unchained was clip-documented via Flip cameras, so I am not indifferent to see it go. Just to put extra icing on the Flip’s farewell cupcake, Cisco paid — wait for it — $590 million for the company in 2009.

Ultimately, I won’t weep, though. I can’t remember the last time we used the Flip for anything. Jott, on the other hand, is going to leave a big hole in my workday.

April 12, 2011

Thomas Sowell’s budget-cutting idea: Cut welfare for billionaires.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

So Republicans got hustled on their paltry budget cuts. What a surprise. Meanwhile, the Tea Party is busy fixing what’s wrong with America by tinkering with abortion rules and gun control laws.

This is an excellent way to blow a once-in-a-generation opportunity. It seems obvious to me that what needs to be cut is not spending but regulation. If the Feds dumped OSHA, for example, that would not only not only cut the budget by all those staff lines, it would result in an “economic miracle” of new productivity. The same would be true at the state and municipal level. Less government means more wealth twice: Fewer “broken windows” and the added productivity that results from investing the money that would otherwise have been wasted on regulatory broken windows.

This is something Realtors and other real estate professionals can be doing in this unprecedented moment: Teaching the Tea Partiers what matters in an emergency and what can wait for calmer seas. Quoted below is economist Thomas Sowell with an excellent idea: Get America’s billionaire tax-vampires off our necks:

Trying to reduce the deficit by cutting spending runs into an old familiar counterattack. There will be all kinds of claims by politicians and sad stories in the media about how these cuts will cause the poor to go hungry, the sick to be left to die, etc.

My plan would start by cutting off all government transfer payments to billionaires. Many, if not most, people are probably unaware that the government is handing out the taxpayers’ money to billionaires. But agricultural subsidies go to a number of billionaires. Very little goes to the ordinary farmer.

Big corporations also get big bucks from the government, not only in agricultural subsidies but also in the name of “green” policies, in the name of “alternative energy” policies, and in the name of whatever else will rationalize shoveling the taxpayers’ money out the door to whomever the administration designates — for its own political reasons.

The usual political counterattacks against spending cuts will not work against this new kind of spending-cut approach. How many heart-rending stories can the media run about billionaires Read more

April 11, 2011

How To Be a Coward: Part 10.

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

Greg likes Michelle Pfeifer. I can dig it.

This is more my speed. Look, there’s always – always a justification to surrender, give up liberty, give up more. There’s always – always some call to pretend that everything is OK.

And we surrender in our selves first, because we become addicted to things. We become addicted to stuff. That stuff owns us.

Then we become addicted to making nice. Because if we’re not nice, someone might not let us have stuff.

Screw that. Take back your dignity and only tolerate excellence.

Hard to do.

April 10, 2011

Do you want to undo the damage the NAR has done to the American economy? If you’re not a criminal — if you’re not a predator — stop lending your moral and financial power to people who are.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s a fun little exercise for your brain:

Suppose I sneak up behind you, throw a burlap bag over your head, tie you up and then lock you in my basement. Would you regard that as a crime?

I don’t mean just a call-the-cops crime or a phone-your-lawyer crime. I don’t mean simply a violation of some arcane statute law. Even if we were on a desert island, with no written law of any sort, would you still regard my actions as a crime against your person and your liberty?

I know I’m asking you to think for yourself, all by your lonesome, with no hints or signals from the mob and no helpful pre-printed guide to clue you in to the “right” answers. Poor you. So I’ll cut you a break: You can feel free to quit this tiring exercise at the very first instance that you are able to truthfully answer, “No, I would not regard that as a crime.”

So let’s do another one:

Instead of locking you in the basement, let’s say I let you work all day in the sunshine and fresh air, tilling and tending to my fields? You are still my prisoner, but you’re not tied up or locked up. Would you still regard that as a crime?

And, hey, we all know that forcing people to work for free is slavery, so what if I pay you a nice wage for your efforts? You’re still my prisoner, and you still have to do the work I tell you to do, but now you’re being paid handsomely. Would you regard even that little trifle as a crime?

So how about this? Suppose I set you free? Manumission! Just like you pictured it! There’s only one catch. Whenever you buy or sell food, you have to do it through me, like a feudal serf. There are other people who could trade with you, perhaps leaving you with quite a bit more profit than I will, but you are forbidden from doing business with any of those people. You must go through me, paying my price. Would you regard that as a crime?

Clarify Read more

April 8, 2011

Friday morning motivation: Computers is dead, kitsch leads to cannibalism — and none of this says anything about you.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
–Oscar Wilde

Like the kitschy “antique” phones at Restoration Hardware, this is decadence.

Nothing but a coy little pomo trick of the mind, but this is how it starts: You have no reason to prefer our product over any other, so we’ll tease you with nostalgia and cool-geek chic, instead. There’s a laptop that praises itself on the strength of its Unique Selling Proposition: Interchangeable “skins.”

You heard it here first: Computers is dead.

But despair you nothing: Particle physicists have caught a glimpse of an unseen aspect of our world, unthought of just a year ago. These are the first days of understanding mass as subatomic physics. Very cool.

The implication? Clowns to the left of me. Jokers to my right. But that says nothing about where I can take myself. The human race is Fortune’s treasured pet, obviously, and with luck we will continue to outrun outright predation, the terminal stage of cultural decadence.

Which side are you on? Are you just another gelatinous face in the mob, grasping for some way to trick people into doing business with you? Or do you have the character to bring real value to the marketplace?

April 6, 2011

The Realtor Party, Part II: The Implied Accusation, and Other (Missed?) Opportunities

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

While Greg Swann takes on the big thinker issues behind the proposed Realtor Party Political Survival Initiative, I’m pondering a more microscopic view- how might this affect the relationship between my clients and me. Maybe not at all. I have no reason to believe that the public will think much about it, at least for a few years, and they may even like it. So what’s the harm?

We know that REALTORs rank along side used car salesmen, lawyers, politicians, and Stuff You Scrap Off Your Shoe when it comes to public opinion polls. As an industry, we are not trusted. At this point in time, our industry is widely considered a necessary evil. Why should that be? We have a Code of Ethics. Doesn’t that make us all, I don’t know, ethical? Our image problem is so pervasive and institutionalized that millions of dollars go toward advertising to get the word out that we are professionals. So how does the Realtor Party solve that? It doesn’t. In fact, it makes things worse. The reason (as in one reason) given for the RPPSI is that as an industry we need to compete with other self-interests. This benefits our image how?

So, I’m thinking… What if? What if we turned away from that? What if we stopped wrestling with pigs and the dirty business of politics? What if instead of more politics, we opened our eyes to the extraordinary opportunity in front of us?

This site is a treasure trove and one of my favorite posts is, The Implied Accusation in real estate: How to win the war on your attitude… It’s not over dramatizing to say that this post changed the way I communicate with clients. In fact, I’ve printed parts of it to give to my clients, who also love it. In part:

The Implied Accusation is the underground river flowing through every unhappy relationship. To address good and evil, all you have to do is bring things out into the Read more

April 5, 2011

What might have happened if the NAR had not caused this economic downturn? We don’t know. What we know is that the National Association of Realtors was the sine qua non cause of the Great Recession.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This post is grown from a comment left by Brian Summerfield, editor of Realtor magazine. Before I begin, I want to commend Brian for daring to show up here to debate this topic. I think he’s wrong, but the man has more guts than the people who pay him.

Now then: I said:

Doesn’t mean that banksters would not have come up with other flavors of larceny.

To which Brian replied:

Greg, you toss this off as an afterthought, but I see it as a key point. You say the sine qua non of the Great Recession was NAR, but it was in fact systemic flaws in the global financial system. Without collateralized debt obligations or credit default swaps, there would have been no Great Recession. And NAR had nothing, nothing, to do with the creation of those “innovations” of finance.

As you, the reader, may have noted, there are people writing and commenting here who are more than unusually interested in philosophy — as a map of the universe and as a discipline of the mind. Brian’s argument turns on what normal people call “hypotheticals.” Jim Klein calls them contra-factuals, where I am apt to rave on about subjunctivity. In all three cases, we are talking about the same thing: We are making what we hope are logical claims about imaginary worlds, worlds not in evidence.

The universe outside our minds has an independent and prior existence, and the objects and events that comprise that universe are real and factual existents. When I make a statement about the real world — the universe of real things — my statement is subject to independent verification. The object I claim to see is either present or it is absent. The event I claim is happening is either occurring or it is not. Disputes about statements like these are possible only to the insane or to philosophy professors — but I repeat myself.

So: These things really happened:

1. The National Association of Realtors either wrote or lobbied for a great host of Rotarian Socialist laws devised to churn the residential real estate market for the benefit of real estate brokers Read more

April 1, 2011

What does it mean that the NAR won’t defend itself from the charge that it was the sine qua non cause of the Great Recession?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I threw down the gauntlet — and not for the first time:

It was the NAR that lobbied for each law and rule change that resulted in the housing boom, the sub-prime lending catastrophe, the wanton bundling of fraudulent loans, the on-going subsidization of the secondary mortgage market, etc.

The villain behind all the villains in the collapse of the American economy is the National Association of Realtors.

We know they’re spying on us. And we know their PR pimp demonstrated that he got bilked when he paid for his law degree, so poorly does he argue.

So: Why doesn’t the brave National Association of Realtors — the largest, richest, most-powerful Rotarian Socialist corporate-welfare-tit-sucking political pressure group in the land — why won’t it stand up on its hind legs and defend itself?

For a first reason: Because it can’t. Better than any of us, the grand poohbah blood-sucking vampires of the NAR know beyond all room for doubt that it was their legislative initiatives that were the seeds, stems, stalks, branches, trees and forests that caused the housing boom, the housing bust and the Great Recession.

And for a second reason: Because they are actively plotting to do still more, still worse damage to the American economy. They will not stop sucking until they have sucked the body politic dry.

How do we know all of this true? Cum taces, clamas. When you say nothing, you shout.

They don’t defend themselves because they can’t. They know they are criminals. They pray, every sleepless night, that you do not know it.

In fact, the silence of your putative “leaders” does not prove me right. That would require an argument — an argument only I am happy to make. But the fact that the National Association of Realtors does not challenge my arguments is potent evidence that they themselves believe I am correct.

Are you waiting for the NAR to argue that someone else is responsible for the Great Recession — for the ruin of your own finances and for the devastation to be delivered to your children and grandchildren?

Don’t hold your breath. They know they’re at fault. And so do you.

March 31, 2011

ZestiBerry: Zillow available for your BlackBerry

by

Realtor, Peripatetic Iconoclast

Author website

If you are a Blackberry user, you can now access your Zestifarm on the go.
Thank you, Zillow! Blackberries are industrial strength communicators. They have the best keyboards and battery life in the business. Another reason I like them is that they have insurance available for the time when you drop it and it doesn’t dent the concrete. And one more thing… you can take a call and look something up on your phone without hanging up. That seems to be a big deal these days. Now you can see Zillow on a Blackberry as well. Are there any other happy blackberristas out there?

March 29, 2011

Is It Really Just The MLS?

by

Retechulous...

Author website

Greg’s post a few minutes ago lit me up.

I’m pretty sure that just like Greg a majority of NAR members pay their dues each year for just one reason: To get access to the local MLS system.

If this is really true, then forcing changes at NAR or killing the organization altogether is likely as simple as building a really solid National Listing system that both pros and consumers would be comfortable with. Of course, the technology already exists and is out there. Adoption is another story, but nothing a souped up modern marketing plan couldn’t overcome.

But maybe let’s not get ahead of ourselves? First… let’s see for sure whether or not most pros equate NAR dues with little more than MLS access?

If you’re connected with a fair number of current NAR members and you want to help get a sizable sample for this poll, please feel free to tweet this, put it on facebook, or copy the widget to your website.

Thanks!

March 29, 2011

What’s the best thing the National Association of Realtors can do for the American economy? It could drop dead — but it won’t — so here’s how you can kill it, instead.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Hey there, toothy-grinned, glad-handing Realtor: How’s the world treating you?

Business is not so good? Your house is worth less than half of what you paid for it? Your kid has three degrees but can’t get a job?

Are you looking for someone to blame for your troubles?

Guess what? There really is a mastermind of evil in the American economy. A vast parasite, a vampire king, with an insatiable appetite to devour everything that used to be known as “the American way of life.”

Are you being preyed upon by banksters? By Wall Street tycoons? By Chris Dodd and Barney Franks?

Those are the folks we like to blame, when we seek explanations for the Great Recession.

But who is really at fault for your miseries?

The sine qua non cause of this disaster — of the national economic malaise and of your own personal financial situation — is… wait for it…

The National Association of Realtors.

It’s the NAR that obstructs consumers’ access to market alternatives to old-fashioned real estate brokerage.

It’s the NAR that insists on subsidizing homeownership at the expense of other, more-productive uses of capital.

It’s the NAR that manipulates the tax laws to induce thoughtless consumers to overpay for homes they never would have — and never should have — bought in the first place.

It’s the NAR that makes war on the rights of Americans to use and enjoy their real property as they choose.

It was the NAR that lobbied for each law and rule change that resulted in the housing boom, the sub-prime lending catastrophe, the wanton bundling of fraudulent loans, the on-going subsidization of the secondary mortgage market, etc.

The villain behind all the villains in the collapse of the American economy is the National Association of Realtors.

The NAR’s legislative initiatives are uniformly criminal in their objectives. The purpose of all economic legislation is to induce by force an outcome that would not occur in the absence of that force. This is crime, no different from a mugging.

As the author of every state’s real estate licensing laws, the NAR mugs consumers by preventing them from doing business with whom they choose — on the terms Read more

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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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