Notorious R.O.B.

Eric Blackwell of Bloodhound picks up on this story that Zillow has entered into a relationship with a number of newspapers and asks a series of pointed questions. The comments section has some hot and heavy action going on therein, and it makes for an entertaining read.

I saw this deal cross the news earlier as well, and thought it was interesting on many fronts. For one thing, unless I’m very mistaken about the nature of the deal, it simply means a co-marketing arrangement where the partners simply add ammunition to their sales teams:

The agreement expands the network to include display non-real estate related advertising. Greg Schwartz, vice president of advertising sales at Zillow, said the Web site will focus on “moving-specific” advertisers like home improvement and furniture companies in search of national coverage. Meanwhile, newspapers, such as the San Francisco Chronicle, for example, can offer a furniture retailer additional coverage through Zillow’s San Francisco channel.

So a ad sales guy sitting in the LA Times office can sell a million impressions on Zillow.com, and a Zillow sales person can sell Home Depot on a package deal of Zillow ads plus say 150 newspaper ads.

It isn’t clear whether this covers only online, or print also, but either way, all we’re talking about here is a “Hey, you can sell my stuff, and I can sell yours” deal. Makes a lot of sense to me without a tremendous amount of downside.

Now, David G. from Zillow goes on to say in the comments of the Bloodhound post above that:

Today’s announcement relates to a large advertising network advertising for reaching real estate consumers but there are also technology and content aspects to these partnerships. Later this year, Zillow will begin to power the online real estate sections of our newspaper partners’ websites. And listing content is already pushed to Zillow via newspapers that are selling featured listings on the site.

This tidbit is interesting as well. Because as it happens, there is an almost exact parallel on this play that might prove illuminating (or not).

Cityfeet.com did this exact play in commercial real estate a few years ago. They went out and signed up newspaper partners, powering the online real estate sections of these newspapers for commercial real estate search. I’m guessing that Cityfeet couldn’t get the online residential real estate sections, because those were too closely connected to major revenue centers for the newspapers. That Zillow was able to wrest those away from the newspapers is extraordinary. And extraordinarily interesting as commentary about the newspaper business.

It appears that newspapers are headed for some sort of a cliff.

That's a double black-diamond slope, son!

The news industry is panicking, to say the least:

The new bad news is the decline in online revenues.

In the best of times, online never contributed more than 10% of most publishers’ total revenues, but with double-digit growth, it was the sole bright spot in the middle years of the decade, holding the promise that interactive revenues might some day make up the losses on the print side.

Unfortunately, most of the growth in the online revenues was due to “up-sells” from print classified listings. As the volume of print listings declines at an ever-faster pace, that means there are fewer opportunities for online “up-sells.”

Considering that real estate advertising in newspapers fell by a whopping 36% in Q2, if online advertising also fell for newspapers, it isn’t clear that there is a sustainable business here for the dead-tree media companies.

So… Cityfeet couldn’t wrest away residential real estate sections from newspapers. Zillow did. In large part, this is because Zillow is many times larger and better funded than Cityfeet ever was.

However, let’s pause a moment and consider this.

• Newspapers lose 36% of real estate ad sales.

• Newspapers lose online ad sales for first time in years.

• Newspapers do a deal with Zillow that is essentially “We take 50% commission for selling your ad space, Zillow.”

• Zillow stands ready to “power newspaper real estate sections” — meaning all of that traffic probably goes to Zillow.

This looks like a total abdication of the real estate space by the newspaper industry, at least to me.

While that’s a big win for Zillow, I have to sound a cautionary note.

Cityfeet, you see, sputtered along for a couple of years before getting bought by Loopnet for $15m. (Since Cityfeet at the time boasted 100 newspaper relationships, including the big names like New York Times, Boston Globe, and the like, that means each relationship was worth about $150,000. Maybe. It isn’t yet clear that Loopnet has made back its $15m investment in Cityfeet.) The reason, quite simply, was that the brokers and agents who listed on Cityfeet were not seeing a lot of traction. Newspaper readers and newspaper website visitors tend not to be serious consumers for commercial real estate.

Now, given the differences between commercial and residential real estate, this may not be a problem for Zillow. 80% of commercial buyers/lessees do not start their search on the Web, for one example. But this should sound some warning gongs:

“This partnership allows advertisers with our papers to reach not only local real estate consumers who live in particular markets, but also consumers who may be moving to particular markets, via their searches on Zillow.com,” Lincoln Millstein, senior vice president of Hearst Newspapers, said in statement. “This is a significant opportunity for advertisers to target a very large number of consumers on the verge of major home-related commerce.”

Um, Lincoln… I don’t know how to break this to ya but… I doubt that visitors to Zillow.com can be described as being “on the verge of major home-related commerce.” Maybe Zillow has statistics that prove me wrong, which I would welcome, but going to a Zillow or Trulia or any of the major consumer real estate websites strikes me as merely the first step in a fairly long journey that may or may not end in “major home-related commerce”. If by “being on the verge”, Lincoln Millstein meant “within three to six months” then his expectations are properly set. If he means more like, “a matter of weeks”, I think he might be disappointed.

And his advertisers might be disappointed. Will consumers remember seeing some ad for a mortgage product on Zillow.com three months later as they’re finally sitting down with their realtor and going over mortgage paperwork? I really, really doubt that one.

As with all prognostications, I might be dead wrong on this one. But all in all, I’m not sure I see this major win here that the newspapers and Zillow would like us to see. Time will tell, but the trends are not encouraging for either party.

-rsh

I don't understand these numbers!

I need help. Someone explain these numbers (PDF) to me, like I’m six years old.

I mean, I think I have a pretty good education. I think I have a pretty solid record in business operations, marketing, and overall management. I think I know how to read 10-K’s and spreadsheets and so on. But these numbers have me scratching my head.

The Census Bureau did a study in April of 2007 on residential vacancy rates.  The real estate bubble supposedly burst in 2005.  According to this GAO study, from Q2 of 2005 to Q2 of 2007, foreclosure inventory “rose sharply” by 55%.

So… uh… where are all these people living then?

Look at from Homeowner vacancy rates from Q2 of 2005 in the chart above.  It goes from 2.2% to 2.8%. That 0.6% vacancy rate presumably means that some 1.2 million Americans lost their homes (300m population, 68.4% homeownership rate, then 0.6% of that number in additional foreclosures).

Meanwhile, the rental vacancy rate goes from 9.6% to 10.1%?  And it went up every single quarter since Q2 of 2005?

Three possible explanations:

1.  Foreclosures were happening for the most part on investment properties.  Those people who owned foreclosed homes have primary residences; they just walked away from their “quick flip” properties, having lost a bundle of money.  But they are not homeless and do not need an apartment.

If true, then the whole “homeowner rescue” legislation is a crock of steaming dung.  “Speculator rescue” is more like it.

2.  Developers built so many rental units from 2005 to 2007 that despite the increased demand, vacancy rates went up.

One would think one might have heard a thing or two about this.

3.  There are now legions of homeless people on the streets of America.

One would think one might have heard about an additional million homeless people.

So which is it?  Or is this the magical mystery vacancy rate number?

-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

From National Real Estate Investor comes news that loans for commercial multifamily projects have dropped 63% year over year:

Commercial and multifamily mortgage loan originations continued to fall on a year-over-year basis in the second quarter, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) Quarterly Survey of Commercial/Multifamily Mortgage Bankers Originations. Second quarter originations were 63% lower than during the same period last year. Conduits for commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) registered a 98% drop compared with the same period last year.

“The slowdown in originations has come from both a decrease in the supply of capital available and a decrease in the demand for new mortgages,” says Jamie Woodwell, MBA’s vice president of commercial/multifamily real estate research. “It is likely volumes will remain muted until buyers, sellers, borrowers, lenders and their expectations of rates and terms match closely enough for transaction activity to pick back up.”

I don’t quite get this.  There has to be more to this story.

We’re in the midst of a severe downturn in the housing market.  The people who are in a position to know are saying they don’t know when things will turn around, as transaction sides and home values are both down in the pits.

This should be absolute boom times for multifamily, no?

I mean, people may no longer be able to get a mortgage to buy a house.  People might be losing their homes to foreclosure.  But they have to live somewhere, don’t they?  I suppose it’s possible that all those unsold homes are now being rented out, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense.  Someone who wants to sell a house doesn’t necessarily want to take on tenants who may stick around for a year at least.

I would think that demand for rental multifamily would be enormous.  So what gives?

/scratch head in puzzlement.

-rsh

Am I being dramatic enough here?

Thanks to a comment on my About page, I thought to look into the dance going on between CoStar and Reis. It’s fascinating stuff, actually. If the story weren’t being told through boring press releases, SEC filings, and dated news clippings, it might make for a great opera, full of passion and melodrama. As a matter of fact, I wrote a little story — it’s at the end of this monster post.

At least, I think it would, based on what little I can tell as a totally uninformed outsider who has not been following the story. But hey, when did being uninformed ever stop your faithful scribe?

The latest chapter in the tale is that CoStar has reiterated its offer to buy Reis for $8.75 a share earlier today (the press release is dated 2:38PM on Wed, August 13, 2008), for the total price of $96.1m. An important point here is that CoStar made the exact same offer back in June, and was rebuffed. A mere ninety minutes later, Reis rejected CoStar’s offer for the second time (the press release is dated 4:01PM, Wed, August 13, 2008), saying:

In the view of the Board, the price offered in the CoStar proposal is inadequate. The price is below the long-term value REIS could realize for its stockholders by the pursuit of its business as an independent entity and the continued disposition of its real estate assets, or by a sale of the Company.

Mr. Lloyd Lynford, CEO of REIS, stated: “It is extraordinarily disappointing that, after our Board unequivocally rejected CoStar’s $8.75 proposal, CoStar has seen fit to come back with exactly the same proposal in a hostile fashion. To judge the value of our company by the daily trading prices of its relatively illiquid common stock makes no sense. We trust that our clear second rejection of CoStar’s offer will prompt CoStar to withdraw it. Our Board will, of course, review carefully any serious proposal from any responsible third party.”

I believe words like “extraordinarily disappointing” and “unequivocally” and “makes no sense” are corporate chieftainspeak for “Fuck off, you loser!” Reading between the lines, you can almost feel the heat.

Initially, I was really puzzled. In normal course of business, getting a 97% premium over the last stock price (which hasn’t moved at all until the offer came in) is cause for celebration and a rush to the alter lest the groom come to his senses. I mean, imagine that your house was valued at $300,000 and some dude rolls up and goes, “Hey, I’ll give ya $600,000″. That’s normally a “Honey, start packing — we’re moving!” type of thing. But Reis was like, Talk to the hand:

The price is below the long-term value REIS could realize for its stockholders by the pursuit of its business as an independent entity and the continued disposition of its real estate assets, or by a sale of the Company.

Okay, so like, let’s go with that.

I spent the last 30 minutes or so of my life looking at stock charts and old new reports and such. Frankly, I hadn’t known that Reis was a public company at all. Back when I was still in commercial real estate, Reis was privately held, or so I remembered. Read the rest of this entry »

(Management suggests you click play while you read this post.)

So while just browsing around looking for info (because I wanted to respond to something Alan Bernier of Rofo.com posted), I found something rather interesting:

We believe we are the leading online marketplace for commercial real estate in the United States, based on the number of monthly unique visitors to our marketplace, which averaged approximately 500,000 unique users per month during 2005, approximately 800,000 during 2006 and approximately 900,000 during 2007, as reported by comScore Media Metrix.

…

As of December 31, 2007, the LoopNet online marketplace contained approximately 560,000 listings.

…

As of December 31, 2007, we had more than 2.5 million registered members and more than 88,000 premium members.

…

For the year ended December 31, 2007, our registered members viewed property profiles on our website approximately 150 million times.

That is from Loopnet’s (NASDAQ: LOOP) 2007 10-K. Interesting data all around.

For one thing, 88,000 premium members is enormously interesting to me. Because Loopnet is the largest online market for commercial real estate, and really the only game in town, you have to imagine that any “real” commercial real estate broker (as opposed to someone who just dabbles in it from time to time) has to be a premium member. (Doesn’t s/he?)

As there is no real study of the size of the commercial real estate industry, I have to wonder if 88,000 is about the size of the full-time professional CRE brokers in the United States. Who knows, I guess, but it is an interesting number.

The thing I can’t quite understand is lining up the following:

• 900,000 unique visitors in 2007
• 2.5 million registered members
• 88,000 premium members
• 560,000 listings
• 150 million listing views

Hmmm... these numbers...

The first piece of information I would want, were I an investor in Loopnet, is how many of the 2.5 million registered users had visited Loopnet at least once in the past 12 months for more than let’s say… 2 minutes (clear out all the folks who clicked on the wrong bookmark or something). Is it 100% of the 2.5 million? 75%? 50%? It would be great to know what the actual “active membership” is versus the “everyone who has ever registered, including those who have become Chicago voters by reason of death”.

The next piece of information I would want is the average number of views per listing. In connection to this, please note this interesting tidbit:

Enhanced Listing Exposure. Property listings submitted by basic members can only be viewed by premium members. Property listings submitted by premium members are available for viewing by all registered members and have premium placement on search results.

So even if some large number of the 2.5 million “basic members” still hung around, their listings are viewable only by the 88,000 premium members. Now, remember this:

For the year ended December 31, 2007, our registered members viewed property profiles on our website approximately 150 million times.

That’s 267 views per listing. But, to be fair, presumably there was some turnover in the listings stock at Loopnet through the year. So how many total listings went through Loopnet during 2007?

Now, I can’t find any data based on 15 minutes of Google searching (and I’m not really willing to invest more time than that) on statistics of the average time on market for a commercial property in the United States. But I did find this Investment Property Forum study (PDF) back in 2004 for liquidity in the UK commercial market. According to that study, the “average time from formal marketing to completion” was 10 months. But the authors noted that this figure was skewed, and thought the median time to sale, at 190 days, is more representative figure. Just getting from initiation of marketing to “heads of terms” took 88 days on average.

So… let’s assume for the moment that from the moment a listing is posted on Loopnet to the moment it’s taken down because it’s far enough along that the listing broker feels he can take it down is 90 days. And let’s also assume that every listing on Loopnet found a buyer in 90 days. That would give us 560,000 x 4, or roughly 2.25 million listings. That gives us 67 views per listing.

When you think about how search works, where people don’t go past the first couple of pages of results, that’s an astonishing number. In residential real estate, we know there are listings that get ZERO views simply because it doesn’t appear high enough on the search results page. Maybe Loopnet has a different, advanced search system that ensures 67 views for every one of its 2.25 million listings? Every MLS in the country should immediately license that technology.

Furthermore, the basic members can’t view listings by other basic members. Only premium members can view those. Add in the fact that in all likelihood, Loopnet’s 2.5 million registered member number does not mean 2.5 million active members. Taken together, these facts strongly suggest that the 150 million listing views is not spread out among 2.5 million, but some much smaller number of users… like maybe 900,00 unique visitors in 2007?

We’re talking about a rather lot of views then.  That’s 166 listing views per unique visitor.  Yeah, it could happen absolutely.  That’s only about 40-some views per quarter for someone in the commercial real estate business.  I just… well… it makes me go hmmm….

I don’t believe Loopnet is lying about these numbers (not in the age of Sarbanes-Oxley, not in a SEC filing).  I just wonder if they’re counting things correctly, or perhaps there’s something iffy in their traffic analytics package.

Or… maybe… could Loopnet be counting the traffic from its LoopLink product?  Seeing as how a large number of commercial brokerages (including the world’s largest, CBRE) use LoopLink to power their own websites (without membership limitations for visitors to their own websites) via a frame, that could explain a lot of the uniques and listing views numbers.

So the final number I would want to see, were I a Loopnet investor, is the traffic, unique visitors, and so on broken down by source: Loopnet.com, BizBuySell.com, CityFeet.com, and LoopLink.  That would give me a much better sense of where the growth is, where the traffic is coming from, and let me evaluate whether the company was deploying its resources properly.  It is absolutely relevant whether 100 million of the 150 million listing views or 10 million of the 150 million listing views are coming from LoopLink versus the main website.

But then… what do I know?  I’m just a blogger who uses Arsenio Hall pictures….

-rsh

Thanks to Pat Kitano, I saw the cute YouTube ad that San Francisco based Rofo.com produced.  Pat already discussed the video itself, and how it shows that smart, creative people can product TV-quality advertising on a fraction of the budget.  I agree with him on all points there.

All I want to do is wish the boys and girls at Rofo all the luck in the world.  They’ll need it.  And then some.  And quite possibly some sort of deus ex machina on top of that.  They are swimming in a pond that bears only the most superficial resemblance to residential real estate, and it’s a pond that is populated by a couple of  great whites.

Commercial real estate is definitely a space that is in dire need of technological innovation.  Rather, the technology is fine; it’s the business processes leveraging technology that is in need of an update.  The profusion of MLS systems and lack of listings standards in residential real estate create problems… but compared to commercial, the residential real estate industry looks like futurama.  Off-market “pocket listings” are not only the norm, but actively encouraged.  The industry feeling is that any listing that is on the Web “has hair on it” — i.e., something’s really wrong with it.  And with the overwhelming dominance of Loopnet and CoStar, it’s unclear that a web play based really on nothing more than a friendlier user interface has any room for survival.

I wish them the best, in case Rofo ends up being the catalyst that CRE needs.  But I can’t help but feel as if I’m applauding someone in a drag car heading towards a large brick wall.

-rsh

This is big news that portends intensely amusing times ahead:

A National Association of Realtors tech incubator company has acquired a commercial real estate data exchange company and plans to use its technology to launch a national commercial real estate listing and transaction platform in May.

Second Century Ventures LLC, a private equity fund established by the Realtors trade group supported by a membership dues increase this year, acquired Gig Harbor, Wash.-based ePropertyData.

EPropertyData operates CommercialMLS.com for the 4,500-member Commercial Brokers Association in Seattle and CommercialGateway.com for the 2,000-member commercial division of the Houston Association of Realtors.

…

Gaylord said the platform will offer NAR’s commercial members “national exposure for all their sale and lease listings” and serve as a resource for national property searches.

Meanwhile, an advisory group formed by NAR leaders is studying the feasibility of creating a massive property information database, dubbed the “Gateway” — featuring detailed information for all types of properties — that could be governed by brokers, owned by NAR and accessible to varying degrees by consumers, real estate professionals and others.

Oh. Wow.

I don’t know how to feel.

On the one hand, anything that could get the Galactic Empire and the Keystone Kops to focus on serving their customers instead of suing each other is a real positive. On the other hand, is NAR the organization to challenge either behemoth — nevermind both of them — in the extraordinarily tricky commercial real estate space?

Even if NAR is the right group to bring reform to CRE, is ePropertyData the vehicle to use?

I mean… look at this:

The value of the ePropertyData acquisition was not disclosed. According to B121.com, a business information Web site, ePropertyData has fewer than five employees and annual sales of $500,000 to $1 million.

Um, okay…. I know a deli in my town that has more employees and has more sales.

In comparison (well, more contrast), CoStar’s market cap is $774M, and in 2007, it did $192.8M in revenues. Loopnet’s market cap is $435.7M and its 2007 revenues were $70.7M.

NAR really ought to have thought this one through more, methinks. All that CoStar needs to do here to crush this nascent problem is to go to the five guys who work at ePropertyData and offer them $150K a year jobs working at CoStar. They’d be fools to turn that down. And that’s if CoStar were even remotely worried about ePropertyData instead of more pressing problems, like whether to have the corporate retreat in Las Vegas or in Orlando.

Here’s a tip for NAR: if you were going to buy any small company that has a reasonable shot at competing with the Two Big Boys, you should have bought Catylist. At least Catylist has experience working with some major institutions that are respected in the CRE space, like CCIM. And Dustin Gellman at Catylist is one of the really smart guys in CRE who really gets the web.

But really… you’re the frikkin National Association of Realtors, with a technological marvel of a building that looks like this in Washington DC:

You couldn’t get Google or Microsoft to talk to you about doing something in commercial real estate?

And yet… I can’t help but cheer the efforts of NAR. The online commercial real estate space is desperately in need of an alternative to the really-smart-but-evil guys on the one hand and the bumbling-simpletons on the other hand.

I look forward to seeing the reaction of the commercial real estate industry, as well as CoStar and Loopnet and Xceligent and everyone else in that business.

-rsh

This is not good news:

After suffering a beating from their exposure to home loans, banks and securities firms are about to take their lumps from office towers, hotels and other commercial real estate. And the losses could last longer than those from the subprime shakeout.

As the economy wobbles and financing costs rise because of the credit crunch, commercial-real-estate values are starting to slide, with analysts at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. projecting a decline of 21% to 26% in the next two years. That means misery for securities firms with exposure to commercial-real-estate loans and commercial- mortgage-backed securities.

Thing is, after the last crash in commercial real estate, lenders and institutions were supposedly far more disciplined.  The WSJ article even mentions that:

If there is a silver lining, it is that the excesses that overtook the U.S. housing market aren’t as prevalent in commercial real estate. Overbuilding of shopping malls, office parks and other commercial property hasn’t been rampant, although vacancy rates are climbing in such markets as Orange County, Calif., and Las Vegas, which have been hit by the weak housing market.

I’m not in commercial lending, so I can’t speak to the truth of this story or not.  But one would think that (a) condo flips didn’t exist in commercial, and (b) the institutions should know better.  That certain markets are hard-hit can’t be denied.

At the same time, unless there is an actual, deep recession, with many companies going out of business, this might be a great buying opportunity for commercial investors with cash.

-rsh

Over on Homegain’s blog, his new home, Joe Ferrara has a set of excellent advice for real estate agents:

As in any profession, you get pigeon-holed, often unflatteringly and marketing yourself becomes an uphill battle to overcome a stereotype.

There’s a better way. Elevate yourself to “expert” in your field. It does not matter how small your specialty because as an expert you will automatically stand out from the crowd of other like professionals.

People feel more comfortable dealing with someone who they know is a specialist. They will seek out experts. Just make yourself known as one.

Then he goes on to discuss five ways you can be an expert.  Contributing to newspapers, holding a seminar, etc.  It’s really good stuff.  Go check it out.

I have one thing to add to his list:

6.  Actually, you know, BE an Expert.

Joe addresses this right at the beginning, but then kinda glosses over it.

You are a professional. You possess specialized knowledge. You may have devoted yourself to extensive education. You may have several decades of experience. But when you introduce yourself or hand out a business card you’re just one of the crowd of that profession.

The implication is that anyone can become an expert by following Joe’s Five Step Program to Guruness.  That ain’t the case.  The precondition of using Joe’s Five Step Program is the highlighted part above.  If you are not a professional, if you possess no specialized knowledge, if your idea of extensive education is attending NAR conference once a year, then no matter how many years of experience you’ve got, do not hold forth as an expert.  If you think you know everything, do not hold forth as an expert — seems to me that more I learn, more I know about something, more I realize that I really don’t know jack.  This is not to say that I don’t know more than this guy, or that guy, or even the vast majority of humans on the planet.  Just that I realize there’s so much more I need to know.

I’m sure Joe would agree with me, but I wanted to make sure that message resonated.

-rsh