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December 20, 2010

A Costco family Christmas

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

“Okay, so one day we’re driving, and we’re just about to get on the freeway, and I look up and the sign says, ‘Squaw Peak Freeway.'”

The Kid said that. Maybe eleven years old, tall and thin. Tousled brown hair and the most beautiful gray eyes I’ve ever seen. He was talking to the Mom, mid-forties, fair and tall. She had long brown hair and eyes of a gentle, laughing green.

She said, “That’s what the sign says.”

“But my whole life I thought it was called the Pipsqueak Freeway. That’s what Dad always called it. That’s what he still calls it.”

The Mom was laughing silently, trying very hard not to laugh out loud.

“It’s not funny! I asked him why he called it that and he said he named it after the mayor.”

The Mom was still trying not to laugh.

“Oh, sure. Very funny. Every day after school we used to stop at the Post Office, and I was seven or eight before I found out that it’s not really called the Edgar Allan Poe Stoffice. I didn’t even know who Edgar Allan Poe was.”

The Mom was stopped short by her laughter. She stood there behind her shopping cart trying to catch her breath.

“You think it’s funny. I think it’s funny sometimes, too. But I never know when he tells me the name of something if that’s the real name, or if it’s just something he made up.”

“You have a lot of room to talk,” said the Mom. “The other day I said I needed to get four quarters and you spent the rest of the day telling people that I want to put warts on forks.”

“The Fork Warters, semi-notorious villains from the nether reaches. Or maybe they’re just a really bad rock band.”

“You see? You sound just like him. Where is your father, anyway?”

“He took off. He said he had Santaclaustrophobia.”

The Mom said nothing, just smiled and pushed her cart along the aisle.

They were Christmas shopping at Costco, which used to be called The Price Club before some genius decided that made too much sense.

Do you know about Costco? It’s Read more

December 17, 2010

Lawrence Reed of FEE.org lecturing in Southern California in January 2011

by

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

Author website

I wanted to make you all aware of a free lecture series, offered by Lawrence Reed of the Foundation for Economic Education, in early January, 2011:

I’ll be attending the San Diego lecture and have a friend attending the Los Angeles lecture.  I hope to have synopses of both, published here on Bloodhound Blog, by mid-January.

December 17, 2010

A father for Christmas

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

“Shame about the bike,” I said to the strained young black man at the bus stop. His head was down and he was staring hard at the ground.

He grunted, a sound that conveyed two ideas: “I heard you” and “I’m not listening.”

“Just as well, I guess. A bike like that…”

He looked up for a moment, piercing me with hard black eyes. “What about it?”

“Oh, you know. Wouldn’t last too long, now would it?”

He scoffed, and that was that. Or so he thought…

What happened was this: I saw a bike going in to Toys ‘R’ Us, about a week before Christmas, and that’s the kind of thing I just have to follow up on.

It was a girl’s bike — a girly bike. Sixteen inch white wheels. A white frame speckled with iridescent pink and purple flakes. An iridescent pink and purple flaked saddle. And matching pink and purple flaked streamers cascading out of the white handle-bar grips. It was the kind of bike Toys ‘R’ Us loves to sell: Thirty-five dollars worth of bike with three dollars worth of plastic ornaments is priced at sixty bucks. Ten dollars extra for professional assembly.

The bike had been dragged into the store by my companion at the bus stop — tall, thin, with an expression of anger etched into his face. Maybe twenty years old; certainly not twenty-five. He was wearing a Michael Jordan warm-up suit and Michael Jordan basketball shoes. That sounds very casual, but we’re talking three hundred dollars, maybe more. At first I thought he might be bringing the bike in for a minor repair, but something about the way he was dragging it — sideways by the saddle — made me think again.

I didn’t go into the store, but I stuck around to see what would happen. Sure enough, he came out bikeless and stalked over to wait for the bus. Three hundred dollars worth of Michael Jordan haberdashery but no car.

I said, “A little girl has a bike like that, she’s just bait on the hook. Doesn’t have a father around to stand up for her, Read more

December 16, 2010

Why Don’t Most New Or Struggling Real Estate Agents Want To Be Mentored?

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

From time to time many of the contributors here have written about the concept of mentoring from one viewpoint or another. You may be a mentor, or have been well mentored, or both. Maybe neither. In fact, probably neither. My experience has been somewhat anomalous in that I was blessed, early on, with an abundance of first-rate, exceptionally successful mentors, who literally didn’t give a damn about my feelings. Tough? One of ’em was a Marine, a survivor of the Battle of Guadalcanal. When he talked, you listened, then said, “Yes sir, thank you sir, may I please have another?” The guy was funny, but brutal. And boy, was he ‘colorful’. Many years later, after Jim had passed away, Dad told me that Jim bet him he could make me cry.

This year has been an eyeopener for me as it relates to mentoring. You’d think agents, especially the younger ones, would be eager to learn which way’s north on the map from someone who’s been there, done that, been knocked down, yet survived to thrive. As each year as gone by, fewer and fewer agents last longer than a week or so under a bona fide mentor. Most say they want to learn, but when push comes to shove, talk must be converted to walk, and they trip on their own BS. In the last month or so I’ve asked several experienced agents who, as policy, give of their time to mentor, if they’ve seen the same trend. Yes — it was unanimous.

Every single one of my mentors, and there were many, extracted a sacred promise from me to pay it forward. I’ll not live to be old enough to get free and clear of that obligation, though I try.

In the last decade or so, I’ve had several agents ask me to mentor them, as in, “Will you please mentor me?” Three of ’em walked their talk to the end. All three currently thrive. Just a guess, but in the last three years or so, there’ve been at least 15-20 come to me, initiating contact, wanting to be mentored. Read more

December 16, 2010

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

… which brings a groan from the deepest depths of my soul. I’m not holly jolly Christmas type. The hustle and bustle part of this season can put me in a funk. I used to wonder about that, but now I think it might be because I already have all I want for Christmas.

I do look forward to my own little family’s one Christmas tradition that isn’t pillaged by the outside world: Our Christmas Eve dinner of duck served with a changing assortment of side dishes and always a cordial glass worth of wine for the almost-of-age among us. It’s a time for us to slow down and reflect and love each other, and for each of us it’s become our favorite part of the holiday.

This is an amazing band from Cincinnati- Over The Rhine. This song is for those of us who dread the holidays but have learned how to live through them by creating our own traditions and finding our own way to be happy. Sing it, sister.

December 14, 2010

The global history of health and wealth over the past 200 years — expressed visually in four minutes.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is amazing, but what’s more astounding to me is to think of how much more dramatic this presentation could have been without the taxes, restraints and wars foisted upon us by the state. Health and wealth are found first and most in free countries, last and worst in slave states. The inference to be drawn is obvious: The less government there is, the greater the longevity and prosperity of ordinary people.

December 13, 2010

Ascent to Splendor: Want to really see God’s creation? Make water.

by

Realtor, Peripatetic Iconoclast

Author website

This just in. The photography in this film that commemorates the Space Shuttle program is stunning. Here is the standard for photography. Remember, our listings do not move and do not shed a ton and a half of mass per second. Here is a canonical archive of human ingenuity at its zenith. A million moving parts assembled by humans in search of splendor.

As Ronald Reagan said: “We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and “slipped the surly bonds of earth” to “touch the face of God.”

All you have to do is make water with a whole lot of human brain power, courage and a million moving parts.

December 13, 2010

Christmas at the cemetery — with Bubba

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

December 25, 1998 – Christmas Day

If you want to hear your thoughts echo into a perfect silence – go to the cemetery.

I do it a lot, actually, not to be too terribly morbid. Potter’s fields and VA graveyards and tidy middle-class golf courses of the dead and tony, upscale permanent condominiums where they frown loudly on walk-in traffic. But democracy makes her last stand at the cemetery, so no one is ever actually turned away, and I expect it would take quite a performance to get yourself ejected.

But the cemetery is not the story – it’s just the honest part. The other part – to be much too kind – starts with my growing a tail.

A Secret Service tail, that is. Last August I wrote a story called ‘How Bubba pulled it off.’ It’s about a teenage masturbator who just happens to be President of the United States, and just after I wrote it I started noticing the tail.

Like this is so hard. I walk from place to place, that’s what I do. Sometimes I take a bus or a train or the subway. Rarely do I fly. Mostly I walk. When you’re walking into an empty dawn on an empty two lane road in upstate New York and the only car on the road is a big black Crown Victoria with D.C. tags, when it’s following you at idling speed with the running lights on – it’s a safe bet you’ve been fed-infested.

Four teams of two agents each, it turned out. They worked in eight hour shifts, and there is no better way to draw attention to yourself than to walk through a small town during the shift change with not one but two big black Crown Victorias following you.

At first it kinda ticked me off. I would run little games on the bozos to lose them – skipping the wrong way down a one-way street, in one door and right out the other, exiting through the freight entrance, that kind of stuff. They would not get out of the car, so I spent about a Read more

December 10, 2010

Knowing The Difference Between The Sizzle And The Steak

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

Let’s begin by agreeing on the proposition saying those who try to live on sizzle, not steak, end up losing weight, till, in the end, they’re dead. Sizzle in many contexts can be fun, sexy, interesting, even impressive, but never substantive. In sports, sizzle is often lookin’ spectacular while seldom winning. The strikeout pitcher who barely wins more than he loses. The .300 hitter, 40 homer, 100+ RBI guy who hits below the Mendoza line with men in scoring position, with most of his homers and RBI coming when his team is eight runs ahead or hopelessly behind.

Sizzle ain’t results.

As a baseball purist and a lifetime member of the OldSchool in real estate, I appreciate sizzle, but get pretty damn agitated at those given more or less equal standing with big time producers, based upon a buncha glitter and multi-colored smoke.

As Exhibit A I offer Nolan Ryan

He’s a first ballot Hall of Famer. He threw the ball harder than Zeus threw lightning bolts. He struck out every third person on the planet earth. He threw eleventeen no-hitters. Then there were the stoopid number of 1-hitters. That’s what we purists call sizzle. I’ve done extensive research, and no-hitters still count as only one win. Strikeouts? Apparently they’re the same as all other outs. The winning team in any given game must get the other guys out 27 times in a nine inning game. The rules say an out’s an out. Go figure.

27 years in the major leagues, and he barely wins more games than he loses — 52.6%. He was the Dale Carnegie of pitchers, as he never met a hitter he didn’t walk. Try almost 5.25 every nine innings. If as a hitter you faced him more than five times, he walked you at least once.

His claim to fame from where I stand, is that his freak of nature body, combined with his superb work ethic and his luck with health and injuries, allowed him to pile up pretty much every stat but the one that mattered: Far more wins than losses.

Compare Ryan to Sandy Koufax. The Read more

December 8, 2010

The first one is free

by

IDX Search Entrepreneur

Author website

Hi John,
I am a realtor in El Paso TX.   i need a slogan that is new to our area for an inside cover of a local journal.  got any ideas? It will accompany my photo and the Coldwell banker logo.   I read that you are a contributor to Real estate slogan and marketing.   Please advise.  thank you, <name redacted>

Hi <name redacted>,

How about: “Your home lasso in El Paso”?

your Welcome,

John

December 8, 2010

Kris Berg took the words right out of my mouth…

by

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

Now granted, I am not a big fan of Inman News all of the time (I really don’t like people charging for news..I think it is a tired model, but that’s just me and my own bias)..and I am and always have been a big fan of Kris Berg and what she writes.

Why? Because often I find myself just wishing I had pushed the publish button a bit earlier on something and then I find that she writes it with a lot more clarity and humor than I can.

When I grow up, I wanna write like her. And I am sure I am not alone.

Take this post for example.

I am officially tired of people crying foul about Zillow’s reviews. Not because I liked them, but because if you did not want Zillow, you should not have BUILT them (Zillow). And make no mistake, we (collectively as REALTORS who sent our listings to them) built them.

We built REALTOR.com and got pencil sharpenered. (old Russell Shaw reference that you need to Google – grin)

Many of us warned the industry that when you supplant your own online presence by giving your online assets **cough**listings**cough** to others, that one day the chickens would come home to roost and they would do something with that presence (like charge you, review you, sell you zip codes, sell ads on their site to people you find objectionable,etc) that you might or might not agree with.

Whether people like the person they woke up with in the morning is irrelevant. The fact is, they found them attractive at 2 am.

You can always vote with your feet.

So note to real estate industry: If you don’t like reviews, do something about it. If you are ok with it, be sure that you are ready for more of the same. More will be coming.

Note to Kris Berg: Beautifully written. (seriously). Merry Christmas to you and yours. 😉

(Further observation…I think the reviews are a pretty lame idea and my guess is that they will die under their own irrelevant and easily spammable weight, but time will tell.)

December 7, 2010

When the grasshoppers vote to enslave the ants, the ants vote with their feet: “I opt-out of California.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From newgeography.com:

So, in protest to the insensitive indulgent big-spenders that run Sacramento, I say, “Don’t touch my junk!!!” My beautiful California home is now on the market for $2,000,000. My next home will be in a no state income tax state like Texas or Nevada. I will not buy that new Jaguar that I was planning to purchase for $75,000. I will keep my old Cadillac and deprive Sacramento of $6,562 from its 8.75% sales tax. My next purchase for my real estate business will be an office building in Prague in the Czech Republic, a democracy that has lower taxes and fewer regulations. My income will remain either offshore or in a state that does not confiscate like the money grubbers in Sacramento. And, I will not be investing my capital to create any new jobs in California. In the digital age, my staff will be located in states that are a little more business friendly.

Apparently, I am not alone. Migration out of California exceeds the rate of almost every other state. Why are my fellow “high-earners” leaving the Golden State? Maybe it is because California ranks nationally in the bottom two for business friendliness while placing third in state income taxes.

We have Jerry Brown as our Governor again, meaning that he will live his entire life without a real job. The Central Valley, once agricultural wonderland of America, has Depression era unemployment, this as a result of a green-inspired court water shut-off designed to protect an Anchovy sized piece of bait called the Delta Smelt. And, our brilliant voters – including those working class voters most impacted – rejected Prop 23. That means that on January 1, 2011, California must begin to reduce our greenhouse gases by 40%. To achieve this noble goal, we seem certain to make ourselves even more uncompetitive with other countries and other states.

If that was not enough, voters also approved Prop 25 which allows the public union dominated Democrats to pass its budget with a simple majority. They did such a good job ($20 billion shortfalls) when they were forced to obtain a 2/3rds Read more

December 5, 2010

How to get out of going to a holiday party…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

So Cathy wanted for us to go to a holiday party last night with one of her favorite clients. I never want to do stuff like that, but I always want for my best-beloved to be happy.

Turns out I got out of going anyway. While we were walking the dogs on the Arizona Canal — walking, not running — I slipped one way as Shyly and Odysseus were charging off the other way. I fell down and cracked my elbow nicely on the tarmac.

We ended up having a very nice evening at the hospital. I’m not joking — attitude is everything. But poor Cathleen didn’t get to go to her party.

I’m typing with one hand right now, so you may be hearing less than a lot from me for a while.

December 3, 2010

Achieving your goals: Things can get a great deal better, over time, if you work at them just a little bit every day.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s my November:

Not bad, and the guitar is sounding pretty decent by now. I’m more action than traction selling real estate, but that’s been the story of my life for the past five years.

Here’s the secret decoder ring, what all those sloppy symbols mean:

S – Write software or work on web-based marketing for the business.

G – Play the guitar for at least half an hour.

W – Walk with Cathleen and the dogs for half an hour.

X – Work out for half and hour.

A – Attend an appointment with a real estate buyer or seller.

C – Write a real estate contract.

O – Open an escrow.

$ – Close an escrow.

Better news first: The server is rockin’ and I’m getting a lot done a little at a time.

Walking and working out are doing great things for both my physique and my psyche. I bumped my repetitions on free weights from 30 to 40 to 50 reps. I’m headed for 60 reps in December. I lost six actual pounds of weight, but, more importantly, I dropped an inch at the waist and at my belly. The accretion of new muscle mass will burn away fat at a steady pace, so I feel like I’m getting where I want to go.

Meanwhile, the guitar is sounding fine to me. Music of any kind is a kinesthetic art: You need to know what to do, as a matter of praxis and theory, but your muscles need to know it, too. To play the guitar, you have to have a perfect muscle memory of dozens of common hand shapes, and you have to be able to hit those shapes perfectly, with a lot of torque, precisely on time. It ain’t easy, which is why it’s so easy to make painful noises on the guitar.

But playing the electric guitar is its own reward. An acoustic guitar has its own sound and it’s own style of playing. But the essential component, when you’re playing an electric guitar, is not the guitar but the amplifier. I can pull a lot of sound out of a solid-body electric without plugging it in. But Read more

December 3, 2010

This Article is a Waste of Your Time

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

The NAR has come out against the Debt Reduction Commission’s recommendation to eliminate (actually, not eliminate but rather greatly reduce and alter) the mortgage interest tax deduction (MID)…  Isn’t that a shock?  No? You knew those dip-shits at NAR would knee-jerk react to their sacred cow?  Hey, I warned you in the title that this article is a waste of your time.

What has caught my eye is the speed with which the NAR propoganda hit mainstream agents and found its way to popular social media sites like Facebook.  A quick look this morning and I must have caught half a dozen agents I know personally, out there spreading the bullshit around on behalf of the NAR; not realizing how hypocritical and stupid they looked.

Attention All Agents:  Taxes are theft.  You may acquiese to some form of theft in the ignorant belief that it somehow does some good. But tax deductions? They are pure evil.  They are, by definition, designed to separate you from your natural freedoms through bribery and penalty.  The mortgage interest tax deduction is no different and in some ways worse.

You might make allowance for the mugger on the street stealing your money because (he says) his kids are hungry. (I think you should kick his ass, in no small part because it may be the best thing you can do for his kids… but that’s a different post.)   But do you really want to defend the guy who takes your money and then tells you that if you will walk where he tells you and stop where he tells you and wear what he tells you, he might (MIGHT!) give you some of your own money back? Are you that spineless?  Let me see if Ican put this into perspective:

I (the government) have declared that all real estate agents must give me 30% of their commission checks. But, I think funny underwear makes people laugh and laughter is a social good… so if you’ll wear funny underwear on your head I’ll give you some of your commission back.

Feeling pretty good about your deduction? Take that stupid underwear off your head and pay attention!  It’s not even true!  The vast majority of tax payers Read more

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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