Egoism
Individualism
Sovereignty
Splendor

(These ideas are explicated in this sloppy manifesto)

 
From soft launch to hard landing...

I have never written at length about real estate--real estate as distinguished from land. Land is just dirt, just nothing, usually ornamented by weeds. But real estate is owned and improved, and it's always in a state of improvement. Quickly or slowly, real estate is always traversing the ladder of utility to its highest and best use. Just as every little American boy or girl can grow up someday to be president--of American Express--so, too, can every plot of real estate someday bear a skyscraper. This is very cool, and I love to watch it happen. But it's not the best thing about real estate.

What is best about real estate is that it makes us free. Liberals think our freedom originates in the right to think, speak and publish freely. Conservatives think our liberty emerges from the barrel of the right to keep and bear arms. But before both of these comes real estate, the widespread right of individual people to buy, own, use and sell the land on which they live. Every stable liberal civilization, from the Greeks to the Romans to the British to the Americans, is rooted in real estate. And every unstable desperate facsimile of liberal culture failed because it lacked a free market in real estate, because mimicking parliaments means nothing when the land is held by a favored few living on vast estates. (The Latin name for them was latifundia, by the way, 'large farms', and every Western and New World state that retained them was not coincidentally ripe for Communism.)

The Hoplites didn't fight to preserve Athenian philosophy. They fought to protect their land--their own freeholdings. Even after Gaius Marius began recruiting unlanded men for the Roman Legions, still they fought not for wages or food or spoils, but for the land Marius promised them when they mustered out. Real estate is the redoubt each man is resolved to defend against any aggressor. The difference, ultimately, between Cincinnatus, the citizen soldier, and a slave soldier, is whether or not the soldier has a home of his own to return to when the war is done. Unlanded warriors won't fight like Hoplites, making them poor defenders of liberty. But since they have literally nothing to lose, they will fight for any or no reason, making them excellent offenders against liberty. Homeowners seek peace at all but the highest of costs. Those who cannot own their own homes, like the victims of Banana Republicanism, are wills of the wisp.

I work as a Realtor because I love real estate. I've loved it since I was a teenager in New York, fascinated by the dynamism of that ladder of highest and best. Real estate is the state sport of Arizona, and all of our laws and most of our case law is based in what Realtors call the bundle of rights--water rights, mineral rights, divisions of air space, etc. To live in Arizona is to live steeped in real estate culture, whether you know it or not. I got my real estate license because I thought I would become an investor, working my way up to becoming a developer. Neither of those things has happened yet, because I got interested in the great game of real estate brokerage, the delicate and fascinating dance of offer and counter-offer.

Real estate licensing laws are a farce, of course. You don't need a license to sell a home. You only need a licence to get paid for selling a home. Even with a license, you can't get paid directly. Instead your money goes to your broker, and he gives you some agreed-upon fraction of the sales commission you have earned. If you think this sounds like Rotarian Socialism, you're right. I have written lightheartedly about the insane math of real estate sales.

The claim is that real estate licensing laws protect the consumer, but this is belied by two facts, the lesser and the greater. The lesser fact is that in most states, it takes only 90 hours of class work to qualify for a real estate license. In Arizona, you study for 900 hours to get a license to cut hair, which anyone can do without instruction--and which anyone can get good at by the end of the third full workday. But to imperil someone's finances for life, one-tenth that much training will do. The greater fact is that all real estate licensing laws were foisted upon us by the National Association of Realtors. Real estate brokerage is a cartel, and the purpose of real estate licensing laws is to limit access to the market, resulting in higher commissions for the agents and brokers, all at the expense of the consumer. Like securities laws, real estate licensing laws may provide some measure of unearned, undeserved protection for the uninformed, inattentive consumer, but they serve to penalize all consumers, most especially the informed, attentive, diligent consumer.

You can note this for your files, if you like. Someday, when I'm a hugely prosperous broker, or, better yet, a sales trainer of eager young real estate agents, you can tell the whole world that Greg Swann says the National Association of Realtors is a cartel, a conspiracy against the consumer. I promise I won't deny it. I'm a Realtor despite the real estate licensing laws, despite the National Association of Realtors. I comply with rules I don't like or respect because this is what you have to do to be in this business, and I really like being in this business.

With all that by way of introduction: Today I was informed by the Arizona Department of Real Estate that I cannot use the name Bloodhound Realty Group for my practice. The functionary whose job it is to approve of fictitious names disapproved of mine. He said it sounds too much like an entity name, which is regulator-lingo for a brokerage name. He's right. It's why I picked that name, because it would market like a brokerage name until the law permits me to become my own brokerage. So now I have to come up with a different name, one that works as well but doesn't tiptoe across nebulous legal lines. And for now I have to put the Prestige Realty logo back on this page and restore my soon-to-be-former web site to functionality. Undoing all the search engine optimization I did over the weekend wasn't as bad as it could have been, and I don't own anything that I won't be able to use once we are lawfully permitted to call ourselves Bloodhound Realty Group and not Bloodhound Home Marketing Group or whatever.

I had to kill an advertising space reservation today, and I said to the rep, "That's what I get for messing around with people with guns." You'll know that consumers are fully protected when buying, owing, using and selling real estate has been entirely forbidden by frowning men in short-sleeved shirts carrying clipboards.
posted by Greg Swann at 7:48 PM

 
Soft launch...



We soft launched the Bloodhound Realty Group web site this weekend. The site is not actually complete, but the last major revision will be transparent to visitors, so the pages can go to work. The brute-force Search Engine Optimization is done, and now I can take the time to do the tweaky stuff an hour or two a day. As you can see here, the button to the right has changed to reflect the new site.

Going quietly live with the web site represents a soft launch for the business altogether. The physical roll-out is November 1--print advertising, the slobbery door-hanger you see here and post cards to our standing database. Everything we're doing is devised to counter-program Realtor marketing. The business cards are making the impression we hoped for--inciting laughter at first, followed by a discussion of real estate marketing. To get people to volunteer to talk about what they want from a Realtor is a small miracle by itself. Where other Realtors promote themselves, we're emphasizing the benefit to the client. Where they argue for the indispensibility of the proprietor, we stress the organization--'we' not 'I'. Where they dazzle you with images, we're telling the story with text--lots of text. In general, Realtor marketing is schizophrenic, half disjointed personal promotion, half bullet-point-riddled lists of listings. In contrast, we are doing exlcusively image advertising: What is the benefit to you to working with us?

There's more. With me, there's always more. We're being scrupulous to be painstakingly perfect in execution, this because so much Realtor crap is such... crap. We want to stand apart from our competitors in every possible way, to say with every atom of everything we produce: This is not the same old thing. If we're wrong, we're going to crash spectacularly. But if we're right, we should do very well. We'll have search engine traffic in earnest tomorrow, which will be telling. Odysseus the door-hanger hits his first doors on November 1. The test on that is 5,000 units. If he can pull 1%--and he is designed to make reading the back of the card irresistable--that's 50 listing appointments. We should convert at least a third, but if we only get 20%, that's still ten listings. At least half of all sellers are also buyers, which makes for at least fifteen transactions. Call it $50,000 gross. If this marketing plan doesn't crash, it should soar.

Feel free to roam the web site at will. If you demo a form, be sure to indicate in some way that your use is a demo. On the other hand, don't hesitate to use the 'Refer a friend' form in earnest...
posted by Greg Swann at 1:24 AM

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