Notorious R.O.B.

About a week ago, the good folks at Trulia released their “Rent vs. Buy Index” of the largest 50 U.S. cities by population.  The full list of the 50 cities is available here as a PDF.  Given the current economic trends, and the rising interest by consumers for rentals, this is a great time for people in real estate to be talking about renting vs. buying.

Trulia didn’t post their full methodology but it does look like they did a good deal of work.  From the blogpost describing the Rent vs. Buy Index:

Total costs of home ownership include mortgage principal and interest, property taxes, hazard insurance, closing costs at time of purchase and ongoing HOA dues and private mortgage insurance, where applicable. Total costs of homeownership include an offset for the tax advantages of homeownership, including mortgage interest, property tax and closing cost deductions.

Total costs of renting include rent and renter’s insurance.

Based on these factors, Trulia concludes:

Price-to-Rent Ratio of 1-15: It is much less expensive to own than to rent a home in this city

Price-to-Rent Ratio of 16-20: It is more expensive to own a home in this city are The total costs of ownership of a home in this city are greater than the costs of renting, but it might still make financial sense depending on the situation.

Price-to-Rent Ratio of 21+: The total costs of owning a home in this city are much greater than the costs of renting.

The analysis was for 2BR apartments, condos, and townhomes — so the rent/buy for single family residences might be different.  But the index is a useful tool nonetheless.

Since I’ve written on the rent vs. buy decision before, I thought it would be interesting to look a bit closer at the ratios — although I don’t have the actual numbers that Trulia used — to see what, if anything, might pop out.

Read the rest of this entry »

From the web publication (seems rude to call it a “blog”) @Issue comes this provocative article about the business value of design, which ends with this astonishing statement:

[Design is] the accelerator for the company car, the power train for sustainable profits: design drives innovation; innovation powers brand; brand builds loyalty; and loyalty sustains profits. If you want long-term profits, don’t start with technology, start with design.

The statement struck me quite hard because I love both technology and design. I had not given much thought as to which one takes precedence in driving business value.

Synchronicity.  In this week’s RE:RnD Radio show, I ended up debating with Benn Rosales of AgentGenius about innovation in real estate.  One of the sub-themes was that we had not seen true innovation in the real estate industry in a couple of years, ever since Web 2.0 exploded onto the scene with Trulia.  (And I would argue before then with HousingMaps.com.)  We discussed Roost‘s redesign, and I had dismissed it as “cosmetic changes” with no real fundamental innovation.

Perhaps I need to rethink that position.

Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Dollinger, of @Properties in Chicago, raised a very interesting question at the Leading RE conference that just concluded.  He then raised it again over Twitter (Matt is @mattdollinger) and the discussion threatened to overwhelm the 140-char limit.  It’s time for bloggery.

Matt’s question was this (in essence):

In 2015, with companies like Trulia, Zillow, Roost and others really advancing the technology of real estate search, should brokers have their own search site?

Since the panel was titled “Real Estate 3.0″, it naturally lends itself to these kinds of speculative questions.

This is an important question.  Money is not unlimited.  Brokers have to make decisions today to align their strategy going forward.  And as Matt himself pointed out during session, brokerages are not technology companies at heart.

The answer seemed to be from the panelists that brokers have to do both: create a top-notch brokerage website that is optimized for SEO, has great user experience, and captures leads all over the place, but also send listings to all of the aggregators to drive additional leads, because the big guys have national (global) reach and can grab so many more eyeballs than a single brokerage site could.

Trouble is… that just doesn’t jive logically.

Internet is Not Local

Fact is, while a brokerage may be local, and real estate may be local, the Internet is most assuredly not local.  There is no reason why someone searching for “chicago real estate” from New Jersey would not find a local website.

Google Search on "Chicago Real Estate"

Granted, @Properties apparently needs some SEO consultancy love, seeing as how it doesn’t appear on page one, two, or three, but other local brokerage sites are right there: Baird & Warner, Rubloff, Dreamtown Realty, etc. all show up.

And Trulia also shows up.

As a consumer, if I go into a local brokerage site like Dreamtown’s, then go into Trulia, there is a world of difference there from a user experience standpoint.

Dreamtown Homepage

Trulia Chicago

The one has all manner of busy advertising, bullshit marketing messages that I would immediately ignore, and so on.  The other has a clean interface, a nice Google map mashup, and easy to use search filters right there on the page.

For Dreamtown to come up to par with Trulia, it would need to spend a pretty serious amount of money and time.  And the Dreamtown website is actually pretty darn good as far as local brokerage sites go.  Having worked on corporate brokerage sites, I think it is no stretch to say that a top-notch custom-coded website with developers, designers, UI design, SEO, and the like can easily top $250K in cost.

That isn’t even taking into consideration what it would cost to develop something actually new and innovative.  A new kind of search, a totally new way to interface with listings data, etc. could mean literally millions of dollars in R&D costs.

In theory, the aggregators and web portals like Trulia are technology companies first and foremost, and have core competencies in design and development.  They should always be ahead of the brokers in terms of technology and user interface.  (And in theory, they should dominate the brokers in SERPS… though often, they do not.)

Branding & CRM

Matt would argue — and correctly — that a brokerage company still needs a website for branding and CRM purposes.

For instance, you have to have a site where your existing seller clients can go, login, view all activity reports on their listings, see where the transaction is, download paperwork, upload paperwork, etc.  (You all do have this, right?)

And it would be difficult to brand your brokerage and your agents as local experts (since real estate is local, even if the Internet is not) without providing some heavy duty in-depth information and data about your local market.

But neither of these things need a SEARCH experience.

In theory, @Properties could have an awesome local website, filled with information about the area, a series of hyperlocal blogs written by their agents, and so on.  But rather than a search experience, just offer a “Search Our Chicago Listings on Trulia” or some such.

Either/Or?

Of course, most folks would assume that like in all debates, the real answer is a “bit of both” rather than an “either/or”.

So a broker would go invest a few thousand bucks to get a templated site from some low-cost website creator, or frame in a search solution from some IDX search provider, and still spend thousands more to feature listings on Realtor, or on Trulia, or pay for leads from some aggregator.

This is, however, a case of “either/or”. One of the following is true:

1. The money spent on putting in a search into the local broker site is wasted, since consumers would naturally prefer (and only find by year 2015) the tech-sites that emphasize the whole search user experience and functionality, and leads would be sent directly to the broker.  Instead, spend that money on enhancing local info, the brand presence, and the CRM applications.
2. The money spent buying traffic/leads from Third Parties is wasted, since all searches begin with Google anyhow.  The name of the game is to rank higher in Google, and not having search and all those results pages kills you.  Plus, you don’t need super-duper search; you just need good clean intuitive search that connects the consumer to your agent as quickly as possible.

Both cannot be true as a matter of logic.

Traffic vs. Lead

An important distinction here is between ‘traffic’ and ‘leads’.  Louis Cammarosano of HomeGain is fond of pointhing this out.  A broker or agent, in his view, could care less about a site sending him a billion visitors if all of them are bored-ass tirekickers who wouldn’t convert to a customer anyhow.  They would rather that HomeGain (or whoever) send them ten people who are solid ready-to-buy or ready-to-sell consumers.

In theory, the third-party sites can send enormous amounts of traffic to the spiffy brokerage site with a great search experience.  Since these are just random visitors, the brokerage site would need to do a lot more — including offering a search experience — in order to convert them to actual leads.  And it is possible that these sites could send millions of visitors, not one of whom will ever hit “Request More Info” or “Request a Showing” or pick up the phone.

That traffic, however, is sourced more or less from Google, which brings us right back to “SERPS are what matters, not SEARCH”.

Or, the third party sites are sending enormous amount of leads, which are consumers asking to be contacted.  In which case, they’re past the whole “search for a home” deal and into the “I need more information” deal.  And the brokerage’s spiffy new search technology is completely bypassed.

Real Estate in 2015

So let’s fast forward.  2015.  Hard to make assumptions based on technology today, with our rapid speed of change.  But let’s go with it.  Let’s assume that search technology is so advanced by 2015, and computing has totally changed, with multi-touch computing the norm.

What happens to search-based broker/agent website then?  The answer is directly related to what happens to the big aggregators by then.  And where search technology is by then.

As the fast and furious twitterstream on this topic indicates, this is a bigger issue than one might think initially, with implications across the entire spectrum of online real estate.

I’m looking forward to the discussion and exploration.

-rsh

I was recently asked by Inman to provide some opinions on a variety of topics, and one of my responses is as follows:

5. What technology trends will change the industry in the future?

Enterprise CRM, married to truly effective, and measurable interactive marketing technology.

In the alternative, third party systems that replicate all or most of the value from a brokerage system may create a whole new paradigm: the Swarm. This is Trulia’s play, in my opinion. I am, however, not certain that these third parties have enough profitability to truly compete with the big brokerages and the power they can bring to the market.

So after I wrote this, I got an email asking what in heaven’s name I was talking about. Swarming? And what’s the connection to Trulia? [Update: My responses have now been posted at Inman News.]

I started to write out an answer, and quickly came to realize that this is one of those things that got stuck in my head years ago, continue to influence me, but that I never really discussed.

So here it is.

BattleSwarm

Swarming is something I borrowed from the U.S. military, where it has been in active discussion (and even quite a bit of implementation) since the 1990′s.

I was first introduced to the concept by an op-ed entitled “Swarming — The Next Face of Battle” by two RAND Corporation strategists, John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt. Their central thesis was that warfare had been revolutionized by advances in information technology and networking, and that threats facing our military in the battlefield were asymmetrical: terrorists, guerilla actions, and so on. (For a fuller background into even the origins of this strategy, you might consider reading this essay that introduced the concepts, but never formalized it into the “BattleSwarm” doctrine.) Arquilla and Ronfeldt:

Swarming is a seemingly amorphous but carefully structured, coordinated way to strike from all directions at a particular point or points, by means of a sustainable “pulsing” of force and/or fire, close-in as well as from stand-off positions. It will work best — perhaps it will only work — if it is designed mainly around the deployment of myriad small, dispersed, networked maneuver units. The aim is to coalesce rapidly and stealthily on a target, attack it, then dissever and redisperse, immediately ready to recombine for a new pulse. Unlike previous military practice, battle management is now mainly about “command and decontrol,” as networked units all over the field of battle (or business, or activism, or terror and crime) coordinate and strike the adversary in fluid, flexible, nonlinear ways.

Right about now, you’re wondering… this is all very fascinating (not really), but what the heck does this have to do with real estate?

Swarming and Commercial Real Estate

Well, a few years ago, I was on a consulting assignment for Coldwell Banker Commercial (which led to my being hired there) on strategies for commercial real estate. Given the nature of CBC at the time (still true to this day) as a national franchise of relatively small, independent, local offices lacking central command and control of larger competitors such as CBRE or Cushman & Wakefield, I thought that the BattleSwarm doctrine might work for CBC as corporate strategy.

Taking down a major corporate real estate assignment is an enormous affair, involving many experts from diverse fields. A firm like CBRE can actually put a whole team into play with various specialists in finance, insurance, land use, taxes, architecture, and so on and so forth to convince a Fortune 500 company to give it the assignment like “Find me 2,500 retail outlets across the United States”.

I thought the only way that CBC could compete is by implementing some sort of a Swarming strategy, where independent offices could smell an opportunity, quickly communicate it along the network, and coalesce rapidly to bring the full range of services that CBRE can offer, but without the CBRE pricetag, in an ad-hoc team created specifically for that assignment and that assignment alone.

As the Sr. Director for Interactive Marketing for CBC, I actually implemented some of the elements of that long-ago strategy, such as an internal social network, long before FaceBook was a phenomenon. I can’t take credit for the idea, though, because it was from brilliant minds in the American military.

Swarming and Trulia

So when I quickly dashed off my response to Inman, I must have subconsciously brought up Swarming. Since the question had to do with what technology trends will change the industry, I saw (and still see) things as a crossroads.

Either the Big Brokerages will master enterprise CRM and marry that to effective, measurable interactive marketing systems, or Third Party Platforms will evolve to provide all of the services that Big Brokerage currently provides.

The latter enables Swarming in residential real estate.

Now, that happens not to be as important as it might be in commercial real estate (because few assignments are big enough to warrant a team of specialists), and elements of Swarming already occurs in residential real estate.

For example, a listing agent who reaches out to a staging specialist she knows, then a painter to repaint the house, a photographer to shoot photos of the house, a home inspector to check out the house, and an attorney to review land use regulations — all of them part of her private network of contacts — is effectively creating an ad-hoc team to service the client.

Nonetheless, if the Third Party Platforms become dominant in the industry, that will enshrine the Swarm as the norm for delivery of services. Consider what services an agent — who is an independent contractor — receives from a broker, for which she pays the broker a share of the commission.

Branding, a nice website, liability insurance, office space, source for yard signs, copy machines, etc.

With advances in technology, I see no reason why a Third Party Platform could not provide every single one of these services to an agent. Even insurance could be delivered as a buying cooperative; if Trulia has 150,000 agents “in its network”, can it not negotiate with insurance carriers for group discounts or group policies or whatever? Of course it can.

Lead generation is already handled by each agent; the existence of a network simply amplifies that. Lead management and routing software already exists. The network as a whole can establish quality standards through things like agent ratings, refusal to work with known bad actors, training offered (for a fee) by network members, etc.

All of this can happen with nary a Big Broker or national franchise in sight. The technology already exists; it’s a matter of integrating it together, and putting in effective processes.

If Third Party Platforms get robust enough, then even the biggest firm can simply be taken down by a Swarm of networked independents attacking it from all angles. With lower overhead made possible by the technology (provided by the Third Party Platforms), an independent can compete with Big Brokerage on every listing assignment on price, with no compromise on quality of service. Indeed, an ad-hoc network of experts could provide a higher level of service to a customer than a Big Brokerage could and at lower cost (4% commissions, instead of 6%, for example).

Meanwhile, Big Brokerage faces enormous pressure on its top line revenues as top-producing agents have every incentive to either (a) leave and join the Swarm, or (b) demand far higher splits and services to stay.

Case Study?

That sounds nice in theory, but is there any evidence to suggest that this will actually happen? There are hints.

In commercial real estate, at this point, I can make a pretty strong argument that CoStar is far more important to a practicing agent than the firm to which he belongs. At the lower end of the market, a pretty strong case can be made that a commercial agent can make a very fine living without affiliation with a national brand, or a local brokerage, but could do very little without Loopnet.

I personally know of multiple examples where a top producer flat out told his broker that if the brokerage does not renew the CoStar contract at exorbitant cost, he will leave, taking millions of dollars in GCI with him. The rest of the services, including the brand name, that the brokerage provided him were worthless in comparison to CoStar.

And those companies, as yet, do not offer the full range of services to its members that a brokerage offers. Once they add robust research, and robust network-driven marketing services… watch out.

The Future is Unknown

Of course, all of this is speculation.  Only the reality of what happens over the next few years will resolve things.  It is likely that the actual future will look quite different from what I’m predicting.

Nonetheless, for students of strategy, the whole Swarming doctrine is an interesting read.  How a network impacts power, force, and maneuverability is not something relevant only to military forces. And I highly recommend checking the theory out… if you’ve got an evening or two free….

-rsh

According to this post on the Trulia Blog, Trulia is the #1 lead generator in the RE.net:

Threewide’s ListHub, the most widely adopted network for listing distribution, works in concert with MLSs, various franchises and brokerages, and core real estate technologies to bring real estate companies a single dashboard for controlling their online marketing strategy.  Analyzing the traffic that’s sent to clients from their syndication feeds, Threewide found some interesting results.  Here are some highlights:

• Study analyzed about 600k listings sent from MLSs and brokers to 16 of the largest real estate sites for the month of October 2008

• Trulia generated the most leads* in this period with almost 12,500 – over 30% of all client leads!

• The second closest competitor had just over 15% of all leads and the 3rd just over 12%, with the top 5 making up almost 80% of all leads sent

• Trulia had the highest percentage of redirected traffic** with over 35% of all traffic sent to ListHub clients

• Finally,  over 8,000 listings received at least 1 lead from a consumer coming directly from Trulia, with our nearest competitor sending traffic resulting in leads for  a little over 3,600 listings

These statistics show that Trulia delivers the most leads, and in these challenging times we all know how important that is!  AND, considering that some of the 600K listings sent to Trulia were already being displayed from other broker listing sources and thus not actively displayed on the site to prevent showing duplicate listings, the actual percentage of leads sent from Trulia to Threewide’s clients is even better than the original report shows.

This is, of course, great news for Trulia.  The data supports Trulia’s business model and its claims overall.  So first off, kudos and congratulations to the Trulia crew!

However, as much as I like the boys and girls and Trulia, I have been saying since the beginning of this blog that Trulia poses a threat to franchisors and large brokerages.  Trulia has steadily denied such a thing, pointing out that they work with and for brokers and agents.

The thing is this: I look at consequences, not intent.  I have little doubt that Trulia intends to be a helpful partner to brokers and franchisors.  But the consequences of that may be entirely different from what was expected.

Consider the above news from the perspective of the average agent.

What services do you get from your broker that keeps you paying him a share of your commissions?  Whatever they are, they comprise the broker’s capital; that together with your labor as the agent creates the economic value.  Elsewhere, I wrote about the relationship between capital and labor in real estate.  The basic equation is capital + labor = production.  So when capital costs go up, labor costs have to go down if production remains the same.  And vice versa.

When Trulia replaces the broker as the #1 source of leads, then the rational agent quite rightly asks, “If I’m getting more leads to my website from Trulia than from my broker’s website, shouldn’t I get a higher split of the commission?”

The same logic goes for franchisors, such as Coldwell Banker or Remax.  If the national Remax site generates fewer leads than Trulia.com, a broker’s incentive to keep paying for use of Remax’s capital (i.e., its website, its platform, etc.) decreases, barring a sufficient increase in production to smooth over such things.

Even if Trulia funnels those leads to Remax National, who in turn funnels it to the franchisee, the rational broker can conclude that they can simply cut out the middleman of Remax and go direct to Trulia.  For that matter, as Trulia continues to do deals with MLSes and REALTOR associations, the rational broker (and agent) can get around all those people taking cuts of their commission checks.

Is there a happy win-win solution here?  I’m not sure.  At the end of the day, the market will flock around the most efficient producer.  If that’s Trulia, then it’s Trulia.  The study results above suggests that it might be.  But then, none of us have any idea of Trulia’s financials… so all this wonderful lead-generation for Trulia might be coming at a loss, which would suggest that it won’t be around long enough to displace any existing players.

One thing that does come to mind for me, however, is that if I were managing a franchisor today, or a large brokerage company today, I might take a look-see at my own lead generation efforts to my members/agents, and compare it with what they’re getting from these various third parties.  Then either prepare to provide value in some other way to continue to justify the cut I am taking, or prepare to invest heavily into capital (i.e., website, lead generation tools, etc.) to compete.  Anything else is shortsighted in the extreme.

-rsh

Joe Ferrara asks whether listings are like airline tickets in his post about American Airlines pulling its ticket listings from Kayak:

Are home listings like airline tickets to be freely given by listing brokers and agents to any and all third party listing sites? Do listing brokers have any reason to complain so long as they get exposure of home listings to consumers and a link to their websites?

My take is that home listings are completely unlike airline ticket listings for one very important reason: the listing broker does not own the underlying property.

For American Airlines, who provides the actual service of transportation, to get pissy with Kayak is its decision.  If the decision to pull its ticket listings from Kayak results in fewer sales of American’s seats, that only affects American Airlines and its shareholders.

In contrast, a listing broker who pulls listings from TruZillia or some other online aggregator has to answer to the ultimate client: the home seller who has engaged the listing broker to represent his property.  If pulling listings results in fewer leads and fewer inquiries and therefore a lower sale price than might have been possible, I’m 99.99% certain that any court anywhere in the United States would be finding for the homeseller plaintiff against his “fiduciary” broker.

I note that there is a difference between failing to list on some website (which could theoretically be justified as there are a plethora of websites out there, and the broker might not have heard of XYZ listing aggregator) and pulling listings off of a site.  I would think that the broker would have to show that the listing aggregator was 100% ineffective at generating additional leads, so that pulling listings from it had no impact whatsoever on the exposure (and ultimately the offer) that his client received on his house.  And how in the world do you show that?

In short, pull listings off of aggregators at your own peril, brokers.

-rsh

In my little prognostication about the upcoming Trulia Blog Platform vs. ActiveRain, I neglected to include HomeGain in the mix. Louis Cammarosano of HomeGain pointed out over on the followup OnBlog thread that HomeGain had launched an Agent Blogging Network earlier this year, and that they were even conducting blogging schools for agents on HomeGain. It’s an excellent idea all around.

Very interestingly, Louis wrote this in the comments:

HomeGain continues to be one of the top visited sites on the interenet-with a difference-listings are not the main attraction-realtors are.

So now we have three distinct models to compare in a way: Trulia as the listings-centric consumer site, ActiveRain as the content-centric consumer site, and HomeGain as the realtor-centric site. As the industry continues to evolve, I think we’ll see how the different approaches play out. But where are they now?

Naturally, I got curious and started digging around a bit more.

I don’t know that using third-party traffic analyzers, such as Compete.com, is necessarily proof of anything. At the same time, I do think comparing different sites on the same analytics platform could lead to interesting insights and things to talk about. So I ran a quick and dirty analysis comparing the three abovementioned sites. This is the tale of the tape. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve decided to post the followup to the Trulia Blogs & Active Rain post over at OnBlog.  The main reason was that what I ended up writing was exactly the kind of marketing advice I would offer to our clients.  The other reason is that I’m too tired to copy and paste it into this here blog.

You can check it out here.

-rsh

Breaking news from Inman Blogger Connect: Trulia has announced that it is launching a blog platform. I don’t have a link, because this was on a piece of paper, but there will be an official announcement later.

I actually had a chance to speak with Vicky Gkiza, Sr. Product Manager for Community, at Trulia and… well… she’s a lovely, lovely person. In more than one way, actually — take a look:

She was really nice, very kind with her time, and extraordinarily smart — as is sort of par for the course for the boys and girls at Trulia.  But the point is not to talk about Vicky.

The point is this: Trulia may not intend to put ActiveRain (and others of its ilk) out of business, but the impact of this blog product is to do precisely that. As a matter of fact, I have a bet with Vicky now that I plan to collect at Inman in 2010.

Here’s the thing: Trulia has 5 million unique users each month, by their own count. If you’re a real estate agent doing a consumer-oriented blog, then what you’re after are consumer readers. ActiveRain, Agentgenius, and any of those guys may have a great platform, but until and unless they can provide consumer traffic to the tune of 5 million uniques per month… I’m afraid the value simply ceases the exist.

I have to take pains to point out again that Trulia probably doesn’t intend malice upon ActiveRain or other similar consumer-oriented agent blog networks.  As they see it, they just want to help their agent members connect with their consumer visitors.  Once you have listings, then have Trulia Voices, then Trulia Q&A, the agent blog is the obvious next step.

I’m just pointing out the obvious: if you’re an agent, and you want to have a blog somewhere, why would you do it anywhere other than at Trulia Blogs?  ActiveRain, as it is, has a tendency to be realtors talking to other realtors.  Which is fine, and might be great for an industry-focused blog like this one, or the Onboard Informatics corporate blog, but… for an agent who wants to blog to drive leads and grow business, I just don’t see the value anymore.

What this product does is divide the RE.net in half: those who are focused on consumers, and those who are focused on industry.  The agent blogs have to find a reason NOT to blog on Trulia.  (Presumably, a good one might be Zillow‘s answer, if they have one.)  The industry blogs may want to continue at places like ActiveRain or independently.

Perhaps after Inman is over, I’ll have to do some thinking about what this means in the even bigger picture: now that Trulia is creating a compelling platform for agent blogging, together with listings, together with Q&A, together with consumer traffic… what is the next evolution for the Big Brokerages like Century 21 and so on?

-rsh

I didn’t realize earlier that the great interviews Dustin Luther got with Marty Frame and Alex Chang that I commented on here and here were of a series. Coz, I’m a RE.net newbie. They’re all worth a read. His latest is no exception. He got some great answers from Peter Flint, CEO of Trulia.com (total aside: Pete looks a little like a more masculine version of this guy, doesn’t he?).

There’s little question that Pete “gets it” about the future of real estate. However, I noticed that he — like many others in our industry — suffers from a cognitive dissonace, that I hereby name, The Significant Misconception.

Among his answers is this passage:

I don’t think it is a stretch to say that the big brokerages are only just beginning to use their websites to create a compelling consumer experience that competes with REALTOR.com. Why do you think it has taken the national brokerages so long to complete on this front?

Building a great site is REALLY tough and it is hard for large brokerage to attract the engineering and design talent to do all this effectively. Brokers should be building strong online experiences, but they shouldn’t be distracted from their strengths and core competency— selling homes!

Now, dozens of executives at large brokerages would heartily agree with Pete. Literally thousands of agents would nod their heads and say, “Preach on, Brotha Petah”.

They all suffer from The Significant Misconception.

(Before you go start making the effigy for the apparent arrogance of yours truly, do bear with me a moment.)

Read the rest of this entry »