Notorious R.O.B.

Riders on the storm....

I’m honored to be asked to give the closing remarks at the Council of MLS conference in Chicago this year at the end of September/early October.  Since I’m supposed to be wrapping up the discussions of those few days, I can’t actually prepare anything ahead of time.  But I can sort of cheat by putting out to the industry some of the bigger issues/questions I’ve been thinking about, in the hopes that the speakers, panelists, and participants at CMLS this year might talk about some of these things.

These Seven Big Questions represent some of the really fundamental challenges facing the MLS industry as a whole.  I do not (yet) pretend to have all the answers, or even any answer (at least, not in public, heh) but I did want to start posing them to my readers.  For those attending CMLS, please give some consideration to thinking about these questions.

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Just got off the phone with a broker friend of mine who thinks I’m plainly nuts with all the fearmongering and paranoia about things that will never come to pass.  My recent series on real estate policy has him alternatively dismissive and wanting not to get out of bed in the morning.  So I’d like to tell all of you what I told him.

The reason why I’m being such a chicken little is not to have the industry up in a panic.  It’s to encourage everyone to start planning.  Now is not the time to be reactive, but the time to be proactive in thinking through some of the issues, making contingency plans, and putting a solid strategy in place so that you will know what to do if any of these things should come to pass.

And if none of them materialize, what have you lost?  Keep on keeping on with what you’ve been doing.

People often ask me what the hell I do for a living.  I do corporate strategy.  Part of that is precisely this kind of contingency planning in the event of X.  No matter how many gurus want to pretend that putting up a Facebook page is corporate strategy, it ain’t.  That’s more in the line of tactics and methods.  Strategy is about looking at the overall environment, thinking about competitive factors, assessing capabilities, identifying areas of strength and weakness, and tailoring a plan for imposing your will on the competition, while making contingency plans.

So some free consulting advice for my readers.

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It’s time, y’all.

Given all of the energy and action of late around housing, housing finance, and future of homeownership by the Federal government, I think it’s time the RE.net (and others!) put together a Carnival of Real Estate Policy.

I’ve organized one and will host the first one here on Notorious.  Submission deadline is 8/31/2010 and this inaugural edition will be posted on 9/5/2010.

I’m looking for blogposts that address the intersection of housing, housing finance, and government policy at all levels: Federal, state and local.  The posts can be mostly about housing, impact on price or sales, impact on consumers, impact on the industry, etc. but should at least address housing policy questions.  They can also be more about the politics — whether such and such a policy is a good idea or a bad one, or whether this policy or that one has a chance of success, or wider political implications, whatever.

This is the first edition; if there is enough energy around the topic, I’ll look to make this a regular monthly carnival, hopefully with other blogs hosting it as we go forward.

How to Submit

First, write a blogpost and schedule it for publication around 9/5.  Then email me the post and the permalink to rhahn@7dsassociates.com.  I’ll read it to make sure the post is on-point, then include it in the actual Carnival Edition post.  Readers will be sent to your blog to read the actual post.

Let’s get the conversation going on this all-important topic.  Looking forward to your thoughts.

-rsh

It’s a chilly, rainy day here in New Jersey under iron grey skies.  If where you are is sunny, and you’re feeling happy and optimistic, and you want to stay that way, let me strongly suggest that you not finish reading this post.  This is where I engage in paranoid fearmongering speculation.

You have been warned.

Actual post continues after the jump.

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Click: The Magic of Instant Connections is a slim little volume that resists easy classification.  I suppose you could call it a book on psychology, as it explores a particular phenomenon that isn’t well-researched: how people connect with each other.  From Chapter 1:

This book is about those mysterious moment — when we click in life.  Those moments when we are fully engaged and feel a certain natural chemistry or connection with a person, place, or activity

Except it’s about far more than those “mysterious moments”.  And as it turns out, I think Click has a good deal of applicability to the modern practice of real estate in a bunch of ways.

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James Pethokoukis writes on Reuters today (h/t: Instapundit) that the Obama Administration may be planning to eliminate many/most/all underwater mortgages in a single swoop:

Rumors are running wild from Washington to Wall Street that the Obama administration is about to order government-controlled lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to forgive a portion of the mortgage debt of millions of Americans who owe more than what their homes are worth. An estimated 15 million U.S. mortgages – one in five – are underwater with negative equity of some $800 billion. (Emphasis mine)

If this does come to pass, the mind simply boggles at the thought.

The underwater mortgages would become Federal government debt practically overnight.  It might be time to think about not paying your mortgage….

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Last night, the RE.net and the world lost a thinker, a mentor, a wit, a pioneer, and above all, a good man.  Joe Ferrara has passed on.  My thoughts and prayers are with his family, and his wife Sandra, whom he loved above all else.

Joe’s Sellsius blog was one of the first and best real-estate blogs, full of interesting thoughts, news, and most of all, a great sense of humor that Joe imparted to it.  Posts like this one usually had me grinning, and sometimes laughing out loud maniacally, startling the nearby denizens of a Starbucks or two.

Joe is also one of the first people I’ve met in the RE.net.  When I first started blogging in 2008, Joe was one of the first to somehow find my unadvertised blog, comment on it, and contact me, encouraging me to keep writing.  If it weren’t for him, it isn’t clear whether Notorious R.O.B. ever evolves.  I called him the Godfather of La Blogstra Nostra, the East Coast RE.net Famiglia, out of respect for him and his sense of humor.  That is what I’ll remember about him — how great his laugh was, how his eyes would twinkle constantly, and how funny the man was.

I will never forget that Joe was a font of ideas and innovation.   Although not a wealthy man, Joe was constantly thinking about helping those less fortunate than himself.  We must have discussed the idea of pro bono real estate for hours, days, weeks.  He was the first person I remember proposing a “Hot Ladies of the RE.net Calendar” to raise money for various charitable causes, like Habitat for Humanity.  His ideas were often great, sometimes not, but always, always interesting.

Joe and I have had so many great conversations over the years, whether on the web, or in person at various conferences, or meeting up in New York City over a cup of coffee or seven, debating everything from social media to real estate to the state of the nation to whether Batman could beat Superman in a fight.  It was our love of conversation that led to the Lucky Strikes Social Media Club, which is still going strong in New York, in the hopes of getting together with other like-minded real estate, technology, and marketing people to share a meal and a great conversation.  That wonderful network of people does not exist without Joe Ferrara’s leadership and vision.

Above everything else, I will remember just how much Joe genuinely loved people.  That’s a rare enough quality in human beings, nevermind an attorney.  (Yes, Joe, I hope you’re laughing where you are, since you loved attorney jokes.)  But he really cared about people as people, was interested in them as human beings, and wanted to connect as one person to another.  If social media means anything at all, it means human beings treating each other as such.  Joe embodied that spirit better than just about anyone I know.

I’ll miss you, Joe.  See you on the Other Side.

-rsh

Future Realtor-in-Chief?

So earlier today, I get an email of some interesting real-estate related links from my friends at AOL Housingwatch (where I pen an occasional column or two).  In it, I find this gem of a story:

Mortgage loan originators will have to be fingerprinted and sign up to a central registry to do business in future, according to final rules issued on Wednesday by the Federal Reserve and other regulators.

The rules are part of the Secure and Fair Enforcement for Mortgage Licensing Act of 2008, also called the S.A.F.E. Act.

They were issued by the Fed, Comptroller of the Currency, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, Office of Thrift Supervision, Farm Credit Administration and National Credit Union Administration.

Well, isn’t that special!  Heartfelt congratulations to my friends in the mortgage origination industry for finally earning the right to be fingerprinted to have a job.  You have managed to join all Federal and State employees in that distinction.  Now when your electronically-submitted loan application is found to be fraudulent, your prints will be all over that email!  There is nowhere to run!

Snark aside, I missed the passage of and the significance of the SAFE Act of 2008.  So… I went digging a little bit.  What I’ve found convinces me more than ever that federal regulation of real estate agents is not far behind.

That such regulation would also fit into the overall shift in national housing policy, of course, is a given.  What might such a scheme look like?

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Few industries worship innovation as much as real estate does.  It is perhaps the highest compliment to a company or to an individual in real estate to say, “You’re so innovative!”

Thing is, I believe innovation is disruptive.  In fact, I think how innovative something is can be correlated to how destructive it is of older practices.  On that basis, I have a feeling — a hunch really — that Hunch.com is an innovation you’re going to want to watch.

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Bringing you a giant cornucopia of helpful changes!

My friend Matthew Shadbolt alerted me to this editorial by Ken Harney, a columnist for the Washington Post, that was published on The Real Deal.  Harney believes that the not-yet-fully-formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau can’t get here fast enough, and that the days of wine and roses will soon dawn upon us:

The financial reform bill signed into law by President Obama may look like a giant cornucopia of helpful changes for homebuyers and loan applicants — not the least of which will be the creation of a powerful Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to ride herd on the mortgage lending industry.

Well, forgive the snark, but… a giant cornucopia of helpful changes for homebuyers and loan applicants?Really?

Let’s see what the wondrous benefits of a $500m federal agency we’re about to receive are.

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