Notorious R.O.B.

So my employer, who graciously allows me to spout off my personal views on this blog, is offering free loot to blogger types everywhere.  I figured some of you could use $500, and since I can’t win it….

So… announcing the Lifestyle Search Essay Contest.  The topic:

Imagine the real estate search of the future and tell us about it.

There’s no length requirement, neither minimum or maximum length.  Either email us the link to your blog or website, or email us the essay (in Word or .txt format) to and we’ll post it here on the OnBlog.

A panel of eminent judges (well, the Onboard Marketing Team, at least) will select the best essays and blogposts (no more than 10).  Starting on noon, Monday, February 9th, and until noon, Monday, February 16th, we will let the readers of the OnBlog vote on which they think is the best essay.

The winning essay will receive a prize of $500 Amex giftcard from Onboard.

You do not have to be a client of Onboard.  And Onboard employees can submit, but cannot win.  [ED: So no money for you, Rob.]

Can you believe they called me out by name?  Sheesh.  Anyhow, feel free to win the $500, then send it to your favorite charity.  For your consideration:

The Coalition for the Study of Mojitos

c/o Robert Hahn, Executive Director

[ADDRESS DELETED <-- ED: This is the Internet.  ARE YOU NUTS???]

New York, NY  10004

Thanks, and good luck!

-rsh

I'm the better looking one...

So Joe Ferrara and I are going to do a fun little event: a live debate on some topic or another.  We’ve been talking about doing this for a while now, and with Inman behind us, I have time finally to try it out.

So, the time and place and topic:

TalkShoe (Link: http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/35673)

4:15PM Eastern

Topic is Lifestyle Search:

Description:
Joseph Ferrara of Sellsius and Robert Hahn of Onboard Informatics discuss whether consumers need or want lifestyle search when looking for homes.

The call-in # is:

Phone Number:
(724) 444-7444
Call ID: 35673

The “debate” is public, which likely means we’ll get about six people showing up.   But all six of you are welcome!

-rsh

UPDATE: The call was a lot of fun, and I owe many thanks to the various folks who participated.  You can listen to the recording here.

According to Joe Ferrara of Sellsius, charity makes you hot:

In three studies involving more than 1,000 people, Dr. Tim Phillips and his research team from the University of Nottingham found that women place significantly greater importance on altruistic traits than anything else (in all three studies). The findings were published in the British Journal of Psychology. And the results may not only apply to women. When questioning couples, there was a correlation indicating both sexes may consider altruistic traits when choosing a mate. [Emphasis mine]

The trouble with this study is that it listened to what the women said, instead of observing what the women did. So according to Dr. Phillips, women place greater importance on altruism than anything else, eh?

How many of these women dated lepers who happened to be really, really altruistic?

How about dirt-poor homeless shelter workers?

Did these women place altruism above intelligence, looks, ambition, personality, humor, and success?

Sorry, Dr. Phillips — you’ve made a critical error by assuming that what people tell random strangers is the same thing as what they would actually do.

Because here’s a true humanitarian: Dr. Rick Hodes

Humanitarian

He’s a doctor; he’s Jewish; he’s charitable. And he’s single:

Hodes’ kids unfailingly lobby guests to help find a wife for him. He dates when he can during visits to Israel and New York, but it’s not easy finding a woman willing to marry this most unorthodox single father.

You don’t say!

In the meantime, here’s a man who is definitely nobody’s idea of charitable:

Not a humanitarian.

He, at the age of 62, has been married three times to women who look like this:

Married a Non-Humanitarian

Doesn't care about charity!

Charity NOT most important to her

So.

The lesson appears to be that (a) never trust what people say without looking at what they actually do; and (b) to attract women, ’tis better to be rich and hated, than to be poor and admired.

-rsh

Recently, I discovered the hilarity that is blip.fm. I’m going to have an actually serious post about that, but this is not that post.

No, this post is about something completely unimportant. Unless you have a soul. In which case, music ought to be very high on your list of priorities. Then this post is critically important.

There are a number of well-known RE.net people who are very active on Blip: Todd Carpenter, Nicole Nicolay, Joe Ferrara, Heather Elias, just to name a few.

So… if the RE.net were to have an official anthem, the way that the Asian American community has an official anthem, what would it be?

My humble recommendations for your consideration:

Winds of Change, The Scorpions (embedding disabled by the morons at Universal, so video above may not work)

Well, the RE.net does represent the first line of the change that is sweeping through the industry, right? And The Scorpions are an underappreciated jewel of the ’80′s.

While it is a somewhat melancholy ballad, this is a song of hope for the future. That strikes me as an accurate description of the real estate industry today.

Video Killed the Radio Star, The Buggles

The very first music video aired on MTV. Of course, it’s unclear whether RE.net will have this kind of impact… but… strikes me as possibly appropriate.

Online, Brad Paisley

Need this selection be explained?

-rsh

I thought Glenn Kelman’s latest post on Yammer was a treat — it’s rare for those of us in the management ranks to get management insights and thoughts from a CEO that aren’t prepackaged and heavily worked over by a legion of editors. The post is ostensibly about Yammer, the new corporate Twitter, but it’s really about how to manage people to be productive:

While I am glad to try a new technology — Dan is such a fearless pioneer — I worry that Yammer might be worse than work, and worse even than no-work. At least when you’re browsing ESPN.com, you feel bad about it. Yammer happens at work, and it sounds like work — you can always tell when someone is writing an email, IM or Twitter, because their typing is so much faster and noisier — so people think it is work, with one crucial exception: it may not get work done.

I’m not sure I buy the talk about collaboration. I’ve seen passive-aggressive arguments happen over email and (less over) IM — Skype’s workrooms are the exception; they’re awesome — that could have been avoided or settled in a few minutes face to face; will Yammer be much different?

As it is, I have elaborate fantasies about outlawing the whole Internet for hours at a time, or even for an entire workday. When I marvel at how a historical colossus like Theodore Roosevelt (definitive naval history of 1812, four-volume history of American frontier, a staggering number of slaughtered animals, U.S. President) or Honore de Balzac (dozens of coffee-fueled novels, written from midnight – 3 in the afternoon, while standing up) had time to accomplish so much, I usually attribute it to talent, servants — and no Internet.

I have to struggle with this issue as well, on a daily basis. Especially when overseeing the corporate blog is part of my responsibility, and a task for my team. The product management team has to be on the Internet constantly, looking at developments, reading blogs, interacting with people both inside and outside the company. And now, we’re in week two of the NFL season, which means fantasy football will undoubtedly eat into my productivity (and my team’s productivity).

Thinking about Yammer, about Twitter, about blogs, about all these “is it work?” type of tools reminds me of David Ogilvy, who built Ogilvy & Mather into an advertising giant. One of his observations has to do with brilliant creative people:

There are very few men of genius in advertising agencies. But we need all we can find. Almost without exception they are disagreeable. Don’t destroy them. They lay golden eggs.

He writes about how he always thought better and more creatively after a few drinks. He talks about how he has to coddle the borderline-unstable personalities of his best copywriters, because they are the ones that produce the best work.

I think managing people is by far the most difficult thing that any person can do. I have enormous respect for great managers, whether they be Jack Welch or David Petraeus. It is so difficult. But there appears to be a common thread among the great managers: insistence on results.

That’s the nature of business, at the end of the day. It is what makes business fun: you have winners and losers, and a scoreboard. Is Yammer going to destroy productivity? Perhaps. But then the work of your people will reflect that destroyed productivity. Are my people wasting too much time on the Internet? Then they will not be able to deliver what I expect.

In my management philosophy, I find that I am more and more going with the following approach:

Do whatever you want, whenever you want, however you want — but I don’t want to hear any goddamn excuses.

I’m not all that great at enforcing this, but I’m getting better. If you need to take a day off, take it. If you need to leave early, leave early. Come in at noon, that’s fine with me. Spend half the day playing video games? That’s okay too. But miss a deadline, or fail to deliver results, and it’s your ass. I am not interested in excuses. At all.

I have never seen an excuse raise revenues by a dollar, or cut costs by a penny.  Never.  I have never seen excuses get a product to market.  I have never seen competitors willing to wait on us because we have a great excuse why we didn’t do what we needed to do.

I suspect that at the end of the day, this is the key to productivity: the absolute unwillingness to entertain excuses coupled with freedom to let people be productive in their own way.  Some people concentrate for an hour, but then need to take a breather.  Others need to maintain a low-level focus for the whole day.  Still others might need to get stinking drunk to be creative.  Each individual is different.

What remains the same are results.

So my unsolicited, probably horrid, advice to Glenn is to let people Yammer away, check ESPN, play fantasy football, do whatever it is they gotta do.  But never, ever accept an excuse for failure.  Ever.  I think the unproductive people will hang themselves on the rope provided, while others will make lassos out of the rope and bring in more business.

-rsh

I want to sell real estate, coach!

I love that Wendy Forsythe, VP of Broker Services for Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate, often blogs on Gen-X and Gen-Y issues in real estate. I suspect that Wendy and I are both Gen-Xers, and if you searched our past photographs, I’m sure there will be a few blackmail-worthy examples involving neon clothing, Z-Cavaricci’s, penny loafers, pastel blazers, Aqua-Net, and The Cure t-shirts.

Her latest post, however, makes us Gen-Xers out to be some sort of emotionally fragile prima donnas:

Professional sports teams have managers and coaches. The reason for this is because these are two different jobs. In most real estate offices, the leader has to wear many hats. If you want to attract and retain Gen X and Gen Y agents you have to wear your coaching hat, not your manager’s hat.

With all due respect to the redoubtable Ms. Forsythe, I’d like to extend the sports analogy a bit more and beat it until it completely collapses under its own weight.

Yes, professional sports teams have both managers and coaches.  If you’re going to wear the coaching hat, and do everything positive and shiny, then by golly, make sure someone is wearing the General Manager hat and being a total results-driven hardass.

The coach might be telling some young rookie, “Hey, kid, I believe in your abilities — just get out there, focus on the ball, and swing away.  The hits will come.”  The GM, however, is like, “Hey you — you hit .220 for the past twenty at-bats.  It’s time for you to get sent down to the minors.”

Wendy gives us this as an example of the difference between manager and coach:

• Manager’s message: “You’ll have to be patient, it takes time to get established in this business. It is not going to happen overnight.”
• Coach’s message: “You can do it. You are doing all the right things. Keep focused.”

Let me add the General Manager’s message:

• General Manager’s message: “Get your ass in gear and start producing, or I’m cutting you to make roster spots for someone who will.”

Look, Gen-Xers are in our 30′s.  We’re no business neophytes with stars in our eyes and dreams in our heads.  Most of us remain idealistic, perhaps, but I can say with reasonable confidence that the Gen-Xers who have moved on into the real world are hardnosed, experienced businesspeople who know how to get things done.  Ain’t no use in whining and crying.  When it’s game time, it’s game time.  We know that.  All the excuses in the world won’t turn that routine flyball into a base-clearing double.  We know that too.

I am now in the position of working with the so-called Millenials, who report to me.  You know what?  I’m finding that the good old fashioned motivation works just fine with this so-called “coddled generation” as well.  Sure, have all the freedom and initiative you want — but when it’s game time, it’s produce or else, kiddo.  If that don’t make you happy, well, it’s a big wide world; I’m sure there’s a job out there for ya.

Strangely, they all get it.  They all respond to such clear, unambiguous direction.  I don’t feel like I have to coddle them, or be their therapist.

If anything, I think every employee of whatever generation responds better to clear, unambiguous goals and expectations.  There really is not fudging around, “Hit this number to keep your job; hit that number to get promoted.”  Just like in sports — there’s no getting around that final score that determines who the winner is and who the loser is.  Gen-X’ers, Gen-Y’ers, Millenials, Boomers, Greatest Generation — we all understand it in the end.

The continual Oprahization of our society, including our workplace, is causing confusion amongst the employees.  And I write as an employee and as a manager both.  Trying so hard to “feel your concerns” and “understand your motivations” and such is actually counterproductive.  At the end of the day, business is simple: the money coming in has to be greater than the money going out.  This iron law of business has not changed since the day Thag traded his woolly mammoth tusk to Krang for the pretty cowrie shells, and it will not change until the end of time.

And you, as part of an organization, are either helping to have more money coming in or to have less money going out.  Simple, isn’t it?

So… yes, by all means, be nice to your people.  Be sweet and kind to your employees.  They’ll maybe be motivated better and respond.  But really, if you’re going to do the coaching thing, encouraging and motivating, then make sure they also see the General Manager thing, that expects, demands results.  Or else.

It’ll be good for both of you.

-rsh

At the risk of revealing the true depths of my ignorance — seeing as how my son is some 15 years away from having to worry about college — I couldn’t help but think about this post on Zillow’s blog:

While the potential gains are tantalizing, there are some major red flags and risks involved with financing your child’s private study environment/animal house. To further tap into this concept, I read up on the Zillow blog about buying a house for college and raised this question on Zillow Discussions yesterday. “Mom & Dad: Should I live in the dorms or will you buy me a house?” Four hours and 45 comments later, I had my answer—-or at least a lot of new opinions.

Do go check out the comments.  Most of them tend to emphasize the idea that 18-year olds are simply not responsible enough to be homeowners.

The author concludes, therefore, that dorm life is the answer:

My advice: Parents, make your kids live in the dorms. Dorm life builds character, strengthens your immune system, and is the heart of undergraduate college experience. Parents, college is your time to relax and enjoy an empty nest. Don’t stress yourself out by micromanaging your child’s college experience.

There are two questions that come to mind.

1.  Is there some magical responsibility transformation that happens between the age of 18 and 22?

Because the exact same analysis — whether to buy a house for your college student child or to have them live in a dorm — applies to whether you should help your new college graduate buy a place or to have them live in an apartment.

My family was not in a financial position where this was ever an issue, but if it were, I’m not sure that I was somehow far more mature at 22 than I was at 18.

In fact, in retrospect, I think in many ways I was more mature as a sophomore in college than I was my first year on Wall Street: I had less money, fewer distractions, and more homework.

Meanwhile, my wife owned her own little studio condo within 18 months of graduating from college, and her parents helped her with the downpayment.  As a 22 year old assistant buyer, making roughly $19K a year, she managed to make mortgage payments every month, determined not to ask Mom and Dad for money for her house.  She told me stories about eating nothing but bologna sandwiches for seven months straight, just so she could make the house payments and repay her folks for their down payment loan.  Knowing her as I do, I’m not convinced that she couldn’t have done the same as an 18 year old.

I suppose every parent knows their own child, and can make the decision whether he/she is mature enough to handle the responsibility of homeownership.  But that leads to…

2.  If your child is not mature enough to handle homeownership by 18, is she truly ready to be leaving your roof in the first place?

This may take the discussion a bit away from what I usually talk about on this blog.  But it is a real question.  College isn’t kindergarten; it isn’t sleepaway camp.  One gets exposed to all sorts of things that require judgment and responsibility to handle — alcohol, sex, drugs, even violence, not to mention the actual course of study, and so on.

It seems odd to me to claim that a student isn’t mature enough to make payments, maintain the property, and so on, but is mature enough to make decisions about sexual partners, choice of career, and whether and how much to drink.

Are we, as a society, holding our young people to too low a standard?

-rsh

This post by Joe Ferrara made me laugh out loud.  Seriously, I don’t know where Joe finds such interesting nuggets.  You want to check it out.  Don’t believe me?  Okay, here’s a peek:

Like I said, you want to check out the post.

For some reason, this reminded me of the rather interesting conversation that Joe, Jessie Beaudoin, and I think Jeff Corbett and Henry Davidson had at the ActiveRain party at Inman San Francisco.  If I’m forgetting anyone, it’s because of our mutual friend Jack‘s lingering influence.

Nakedlistings.com

Yes, the URL is parked courtesy of GoDaddy.com.  I wonder who bought that…  (Jessie?  Was it you? You did threaten to do just that at the party, hehe.)

The concept is simple.  It will be a direct analogue to nakednews.com (NOT SAFE FOR WORK).  Each listing is a ~60 second video in which an attractive woman talks about the property, while taking her clothes off.  I know that every single reader is going, “Are you insane?”

The key to nakedlistings.com working is that it only deals with commercial real estate listings.

As much as I like and respect commercial real estate and the top-notch professionals who work in it… let’s face facts, shall we?  I don’t know that I’ve seen a more macho, more male-dominated industry outside of Wall Street trading floors in the early 90′s (and restaurant kitchens, incidentally).  Things that would shock the average corporate person happens all the time in the rough and tumble world of commercial real estate.

Therefore, nakedlistings.com would absolutely work in commercial real estate.  Consumers generally don’t look for commercial properties; only professionals do.  The vast majority of those professionals (CREW – Commercial Real Estate Women – says 23% of commercial brokers are women, but I think that’s a significant overestimation) are men, and men of a certain type, who would sit through a 60 second listings presentation simply because the presenter is stripping as she talks about column spacing and loading dock heights.

So you heard the idea here first.   You are hereby free to take advantage of it, as I have no desire to explain to my United Methodist Church pastor parents what I do for a living were I operating nakedlistings.com.

Now, there is a serious point here.  Allow me to dig it up.

In marketing, especially in real estate marketing, there is a very serious tendency to focus on the product and the service provider (i.e., the agent).  But few real estate marketers think very hard about the audience.  Listings flyers are produced that betrays a real lack of thinking about whom said flyers are targeting.  One page rinky-dink flyers for a $15m alpine mansion is just one example.  Agents and brokers have websites that were obviously constructed from some off-the-shelf template from a cut-rate agency, yet they work and operate in high-end neighborhoods where the median family income is over $150,000 a year.

If nakedlistings.com can work, it’s only because it starts with identifying a specific audience segment that would be receptive to what is otherwise crass and offensive.  The Lush campaign that Joe Ferrara discussed might work because it did similar audience segmentation and identified a group that would respond to the sex-based marketing.

Think about the audience.  It is likely to be important.

-rsh

I’ve decided I need to do one of these every week. Break up the heavy duty real estate theorizing — it can get a bit much even for me after while….

So… let’s see… hit Play on my Shuffle…

L’Amour Toujours (I’ll Fly With You)

Gigi D’Agostino

I have no idea how this track ended up in my music collection. I have never bought a single dance CD or MP3 in my life. Plus, I don’t know who Gigi D’Agostino is. Nor this song.  So how did it end up not only in my music collection, but on my iPod?

I must have heard it at some point and dragged it over into the playlist…

But how did it end up in my possession in the first place?  I suspect that everyone has songs or CD’s like this, where you hear it and go… “When did I get that?”  Was it an ex-girlfriend who gave me a mix that I ripped back when I was digitizing my CD collection?  Did I buy it and totally forget about it?  Did the music fairy stop by my computer?

The upside is that I like it alot.

I love trance; I like dance music in general.  Always have.  In high school, I remember going to a friend’s house, sitting in the basement and listening to various Euro-disco tapes that she had brought back from her trips abroad.  Songs with German lyrics and pumping basslines, with nary a stringed instrument in sight, like “Du bist mein ganzes herz” or something like that.  All of it was catchy, sugary pop, unserious, and eminently danceable.

This song… what’s not to like?  Nice beat, thumping bassline, a pretty vocal melody laid on top of it all.  Close your eyes and you can almost imagine yourself at some dark nightclub with laser lights, beautiful young people blitzed out of their minds, the tang of sweat, sex, and animal attraction wafting through the humid air….

Turns out, according to Wikipedia, Gigi D’Agostino is some sort of a grandmaster of DJ’s:

As a DJ, D’Agostino is known as one of the “pioneers of Mediterranean Progressive Dance”^[2] consisting of minimalistic sounds and catchy, Latin melodies and especially Mediterranean melodies. As a producer, Gigi D’Agostino’s strength – or “Gigi Dag”, the pseudonym he uses for himself in club productions – lies in transforming a piece, originally destined only for the discos, into a success for the main-stream public.

Until this moment, I did not know that there was such a thing as “Mediterranean Progressive Dance” of which Gigi D’Agostino is a pioneer.  Is this a good thing?  Can we slice musical genres by geography now?  Maybe I can be the pioneer of the “Suburban New Jersey Progressive Hardcore” — if I had any musical talent whatsoever, at least.

Something I’m still trying to figure out… what makes a DJ great?  I mean, what sets Gigi apart from the guy that played at my wedding?  Is it their ability to know what moves the crowd?  The European dance DJ’s don’t do any scratching or turntable skillz like the hip hop DJ’s do.  So what makes them great?

In any case, that’s what’s playing.  I’m going to go reminisce about days gone by.  Dark cavernous rooms.  Endless energy.  When the world was all possibilities and crossroads.  The soundtrack of those days would surely be techno and trance music.

-rsh

One of my favorite marketing blogs has a new post up that has me absolutely scratching my head:

For example, recent studies show that more men than ever are making dinner, doing housework and managing the kids. That sure sounds a lot like my neighborhood. Still, you’d never know it from what brands reflect in their ad campaigns.

As Jack Essig, publisher of Rodale’s Men’s Health magazine put it in the AdWeek piece: he “believes there’s a gender-based blind spot in home brands today that is the inverse of one by car companies a couple decades ago.

‘Ten or 15 years ago, car companies were speaking primarily to men and assuming men were making the majority of car-purchasing decisions, only for research to show that women were really weighing in,’ Essig says. ‘I think the same is true for a lot of home decor and other home brands when it comes to speaking to men. They want their home to reflect their personality as well.’

It is entirely understandable, according to my wife, that I scratch my head here, since, according to her, I entirely lack even a single feminine trait. I happen to disagree with her, since I can talk fashion and design with just about any woman, dig on opera, and have in fact been called a ‘metrosexual’ more than once.

At the same time, I really don’t get the highlighted sentence. I know my input in the home buying and home decorating process was limited more or less to, “How much is it?” and “Where should I put this couch you’ve bought, hon?” I sorta preferred it that way.

But if anyone can speak with authority on whether more men are “buying like a woman” (to quote the author of that post) when it comes to matters of the home, I figure it would be real estate agents. I’d like to hear from readers — are you seeing men more involved with the home purchase decision in ways one might consider ‘traditionally feminine’?

Have you shifted how you market to men as a result?

-rsh