Notorious R.O.B.

Had a most interesting discussion with a REALTOR friend last night over dinner about professional ethics, and came across an interesting question. We didn’t know the answer, so I figured I’d blog about it and ask you all.

The question is whether a REALTOR has a duty to disclose bad acts by a client, or more importantly, by an ex-client, if she knows that what the client is planning on doing is (a) illegal, (b) unethical, and/or (c) fraudulent.

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I’ve watched the above video three times now. It’s Morgan Spurlock, the filmmaker who made a number of documentaries, the most widely known of which is Supersize Me, talking about his new project: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. It’s a look at the world of sponsorship, branding, and advertising.

Watch the whole video. The TED talk is really funny, it’s a great presentation, and the message is not lost. Spurlock thinks there isn’t enough transparency in business practices.  Transparency is scary, unpredictable, and risky for businesses. Yet, he believes it might be the way for companies and organizations to rise above the sea of carefully constructed brand narratives, massaged public relations messaging, and the like.

Well, I was inspired enough to try something: sell transparent sponsorship to one of my own “media activities” that is coming up.

I will be attending the NAR Mid-Year Legislative Meetings & Trade Expo this year. This will be the first one I will be attending with a “Press” badge. That means, in my mind, that I’m not attending merely as another vendor slut whore trying to drum up business from important people I’ll be meeting. To be sure, I’ll be trying to do just that, of course. But attending on a Press badget suggests to me that this year, I should actually do something related to y’know ‘journalistic-type’ of activities. Reporting on what I’m seeing and hearing. Reporting on the big Board of Directors vote on REALTOR Party Political Survival Initiative. Maybe even actually walking through the Trade Expo and reporting on new innovations, or lack thereof. This could be fun and interesting.

But of course, I’m not employed by any news organization to do these things. I’m paying for all of this out of pocket.

After watching Morgan Spurlock, I figured… hey, why not forthrightly sell the sponsorship rights to my NAR Mid-Year “Reporting”? (I put that in quotes since my reporting is likely to be filled with opinions and possible snark, and will feature the same level of fact-checking as say the New York Times, which is to say little to none.)

Therefore… presenting, Sponsor My NAR Mid-Year Reporting auction on Ebay!

I’d like to thank Jeff Turner (@respres) for being the first — and hopefully not the last — bidder for this once-in-a-lifetime-year opportunity. I mean, c’mon, if Jeff Turner — the most respected man in the RE.net — is willing to sponsor me, surely I’m on to something, right? So if you have a product or service you’d like to put in front of thousands of industry leaders, company CEO’s, and thought shapers who frequent this blog (and my 7DS blog), you should follow Jeff’s lead and start bidding up the sponsorship. Details are contained in the Ebay posting.

For the sake of transparency, which is the point of this exercise, I must inform you that my enthusiasm for reporting on the various goings-on at NAR Mid-Year is very likely to correlate inversely to the gap between my out of pocket expenses for doing so and the sponsorship dollars generated by this effort: smaller that gap, more enthusiastic I become as an amateur journalist/op-ed writer, and more stuff I’m like to cover. If the gap disappears altogether, or I actually make money from this, I might find a way to hunt down Lawrence Yun and take a photo with him side-by-side so as to dispel the myth that we are, in fact, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of real estate. (Lawrence and I have never been seen in the same place at the same time, you know… a fact that should make you wonder.)

And of course, at the conclusion of this experiment, I hope to have some thoughts on transparency, sponsorship, and the “media” in our industry. So join me, join Jeff, in this adventure.

Thank you

-rsh

This semi-shameless promotional message brought to you by The Hahn Foundation for Children: Advancing the educational opportunities of two specific American kids every day!

Don't look particularly magical, do they?

I just went to Easter services — the one worship service I make a point of not missing, even though I’m a terrible, terrible Christian in so many ways — at a local church here in Houston. Given that we haven’t yet found a home church, which likely will need to wait until we find a, y’know, a permanent home… it was really quite nice to be just a guest.

But at this service, the absolutely mundane yet absolutely amazing fact of the church choir just struck me. I thought I’d share that with you all.

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Not just a great phone, but a bug approved by the CIA!

Well, at least if you’re the manager of an office, or the broker in charge. It appears the iPhone doubles as a time-stamped tracking device:

Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden, a pair of security researchers, recently discovered that iPhones — as well as 3G-enabled iPads — running iOS 4 constantly record and store their users’ locations in unencrypted files. These files are basically very long lists of latitude-longitude coordinates and timestamps, and they can be found on the devices themselves as well as within the software backups saved on users’ computers.

Whee!

So let’s say you’re the broker or manager, and you have a team of agents who are supposedly hard at work at listing appointments, showing houses, meeting with prospects, and the like. If they own a Blackberry or an Android phone, then you’ll just have to trust that they’re in fact out doing productive things, instead of just improving their golf handicap or something. But if they own an iPhone, then you can install this handy little iPhone Tracker on your computer, ask them for the phone, plug it in, and voila! Confirmation of where they were and at what time.

Yes, this is creepy. Yes, real estate agents are independent contractors, at least in theory, and can set their own schedule. But if you suspect any one of goofing off, or not doing what she told you she was doing that afternoon, then you can check out the story very easily.

So, brokers, buy your agent an iPhone 4 today! They’ll love you for it, and you can track their movements.

-rsh

PS: In case you were wondering, yes, this is very much tongue-in-cheek. I know it’s hard to tell sometimes…

In my first blog conversation post, I wrote about Millenial family formation. That was fun stuff, and Travis Robertson, my dialogue partner, has posted his response. Go check it out; it’s worth a read, and the discussion is fun. But I thought I’d move onto some of the real meat.

Travis claims in the video (embedded in the first post) that companies — and specifically real estate brokerages — have to change the way they operate in order to recruit the Millenials. I don’t think so; I rather think Millenials have to change the way they operate and view the world in order to be recruited by employers, including brokerages (at least the ones that demand something of their agents).

I’m going to be referring to Travis’s posts and his eBook; and I do encourage you to go check them out.

In this part, let’s address the issue of managing Millenials.

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I don’t often write anymore about blogging and social media. There are too many people out there who do nothing else, and the topic seems sort of beaten to death to me. But I’m going to today, because I’m inspired from an unexpected source.

Regulars know that I think Alison Krauss and Union Station is the greatest musical group working today, and possibly of all time. I would gladly put them up against the Beatles, against Led Zeppelin, against anyone at any time. Alison Krauss herself has won 26 (yeah, that’s twenty six) Grammy Awards — a world record. Jerry Douglas, her dobrist, has 12 Grammys to his name, and her bassist Barry Bales has 13. That’s an astonishing 51 Grammy Awards just between these three members. Dan Tyminski and Ron Block are both incredible musicians in their own right. We’re looking at three, maybe four surefire hall of famers in the same band.

Well, AKUS has just released a new album, Paper Airplane, which I went out and bought immediately. And it is just a lovely, lovely work. The video above is their first single and the title track, and showcases just how amazingly talented this group of musicians are. Alison’s voice, of course, is a once-in-a-generation gift.

But I was inspired to write this while reading up on their new album. Alison says something that really resonated with me, even though she’s a musical artist headed to immortality, and I’m just a random blogger fella on the Internetz.

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pecunia loquitur

One of my favorite writers/bloggers, Brian Boero of 1000watt, has another gem up on his blog, in which he excoriates an unnamed “large regional company” for recruiting “dual-career agents”. It’s worth a read, and it’s short.

In it, he makes this claim:

Companies with strong organizations, a discriminating approach to recruiting, and standards around service delivery are beginning to pointedly position themselves against the companies in their markets without these things.

It’s resonating.

That’s fantastic news. Now, show me the money.

Todd Waller, in the comments, writes, “Thank you for continuing to be a beacon of sanity in an industry that is easily sidetracked by the siren’s call of the almighty dollar.”

Pam O’Connor, a brilliant executive and longtime veteran of the industry, also comments, “Until our industry becomes about talent selection instead of recruiting, and about standards and accountability instead of churning bodies and hoping some will “take,” consumers will continue to lack confidence, making it an uphill climb for the true professionals who are tainted by the rest.”

Agree wholeheartedly with both Todd and Pam. Now, show me the money.

It’s quite simple. Brokers are not in business to screw consumers. Nor are they in business to bring shame upon the industry. They’re in business to make money, and turn a profit.

The reason why these business models are embraced is because they make money. If the “higher plane” model of real estate that you, me, Brian, Todd, and Pam all espouse made more money than the scrape-the-bottom models, and killed the unprofessional models in the marketplace, then everyone would swiftly abandon those and join the Raise The Bar Brokerage model.

To that extent, I disagree with my friend Todd. The siren’s call of the Almighty Dollar is the reason to be in business. Otherwise, convert the brokerage right now, today, into a non-profit and Do Good.

So here’s the challenge for the critics of the broken brokerage model of our industry: start posting numbers. Don’t just tell me and the world that companies are “positioning themselves” against the crap competition; tell me that those companies are kicking the ass of the crap competition, and by how much: Good Professionals Realty has 62% market share, made $4 billion in sales, at 32% profit margins last year, vs. Generic Crap Brokerage who has 12% market share and lost a million bucks last year, despite having 500 more agents than Good Professionals Realty. That would be welcome news.

Let’s stop banging that same old drum, complaining about how crappy some agents are; we all know. Do let’s start banging the drum of how talent selection, standards and accountability yield superior financial performance. A respected firm like 1000watt can undertake a benchmark study of broker performance, broken down by talent selection & standards ratings, and show us all that indeed, the high road pays better than the low road. A major company like Leading Real Estate Companies of the World can commission such a study.

In fact, here’s a call to action. Send me your recruiting, training, standards, accountability and operating processes along with 3 years of financials. I’ll gladly, and for no charge, do whatever number crunching and happily start compiling data on financial performance of the high road brokerage models. I’ll never release your individual info, but happily benchmark your performance against everyone else who sends me data. I’m probably not going to get the low road guys to send me anything, but at a minimum, if we can show that the high road results in 15% revenue growth year over year, 20% market share growth year over year, and healthy, above-average profit margins… maybe some of those low-road guys might see reason to change.

Because pecunia loquitur, my friends. Money talks.

-rsh

Travis Robertson is one of my new friends from RETech South. He’s one of the brightest, most thoughtful young men I’ve met in recent years, and I think the world of him. And of course, when I can debate significant issues with intelligent people I genuinely like, that’s pretty close to nirvana for me. Well, adding a few mugs of beer and doing it in person would be best… But lacking that, Travis and I agreed to carry on a series of blogposts in which we debate the impact of the Millenials (sometimes called Gen-Y).

First, let me urge you to watch Travis’s speech at RETechSouth. It’s an hour long, but it’s fully worthwhile, if only for yours truly being mentioned in an amusing context:

This is going to be a topic we won’t settle in one post. But longtime readers know that I’ve been skeptical about the Gen-Y’s future for a variety of reasons. I’m already on record as suggesting that real estate won’t be saved by the Gen-Y; Travis agrees, but suggests Gen-Y will change real estate.

Well, every generation changes the world around it. But what I’d like to challenge is the phenomenon of Millenial Triumphalism, in which the Gen-Y and its enablers make the kind of statements about why Gen-Y is unlike any other generation that came before it, and talk as if the Millenials are the change that they’ve been waiting for. My admittedly more tempered view is that before the Millenials will change the world, the world will change Millenials.

In this post, let’s talk specifically about family formation — the topic that spawned my comment about polygamy — as one of the driving factors behind home sales is family formation: people meeting, falling in love, getting married, and starting a family.

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I just got back from three amazing days in Atlanta at RETech South. I think I feel pretty comfortable saying that RETech South (#RETSO) is today the best wide-audience real estate conference in the country. Brad Nix and Mike Pennington, the two righteous gents in charge of RETSO deserve so much credit for the amazing job they did.

It will take weeks for me to absorb everything, but for now, here are seven things I learned at RETech South… with music videos!

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