A Truly Merry Christmas

Leave a reply

I’ve always thought of Christmas celebrations as falling into one of two categories: those that involve going to church on Christmas Eve and those that don’t.  I never realized that Christmas celebrations could involve Jell-O Shooters and drunk white people wielding silly hats, chainsaws, radar guns and paint guns, AND a drunk older fellow squeezing himself into an old (children’s) Batman costume thus exposing his tighty-whities.  Even more amazing is that one particular celebration could incorporate all of that and more.

Read about it and see lots of pictures here.

Thanks to Lex for the lead.

Realtors Running Scared

8 Replies

There’s an interesting item at the Business 2.0 blog about a website in Madison, Wisconsin for people selling their own homes, or in the real estate vernacular it’s a site of "for sale by owner" (FSBO) properties.  Here are the critical numbers they cite:

  • The site has captured about 20% of the county’s listings.
  • If agents had sold all the properties listed on the site and had a standard 6% commission the amount paid to the realtors would have been $17.3 million.
  • The site collected $300,000 for those listings.

If you want to check out the site you can find it at FSBOMadison.com.

Well here’s what I think.  Traditionally, the biggest advantage of hiring a realtor as a seller was access to the MLS (multiple listing service).  By using the realtor’s service you were broadcasting the availability of your property to the world at large much more quickly than you could do it yourself.  Now, though, with FSBO services and other online tools like CraigsList you can get the word out there very quickly all by yourself.  The realtors probably instinctively know this, but don’t want to admit it.  They better wake up though, because their biggest asset on the sales side is disappearing. Agents will tell you that they also give their clients advice on prepping their property for sale (empty those closets, unclutter your kitchen, etc.) but you can get the same info from a "Selling Home for Dummies" book.

As a buyer, especially if you’re moving into a new area, the biggest advantage of using a realtor is their knowledge of neighborhoods.  Celeste and I found this out when we moved from DC to Winston-Salem two years ago.  We did a lot of online research before we started working with our realtor but it became pretty apparent that we needed the services of someone who could match our needs to a neighborhood.  In other words we needed a highly specialized service and we definitely benefited from our agent’s service.  (BTW, if you need a good agent I highly recommend MaryLee Hester of Prudential Carolinas Realty).  I don’t see that advantage disappearing any time soon.

My prediction is that the real estate business is going to change.  Smart agents will not worry as much about being the listing agent and will instead focus on providing services to buyers.  They will embrace the evolving FSBO market by being flexible.  The really smart ones will help get one of the dirty little secrets out about real estate: selling is easy.  Most people don’t know that it is up to the buyer to get a contract written up and submitted to the seller for consideration AND that you can get a contract written up by a real estate attorney for a few hundred dollars.  And the new FSBO sites and online listing services will take care of the marketing.

(Disclaimer: As always there is the possibility that your house is a pig, and even if you put lipstick on it you’ll still have a pig.)

Smart agents will focus on helping their clients find the perfect home and then provide them with a list of real estate attorneys just like they do with plumbers, general contractors, etc.  They will mine the FSBO sites and CraigsList for leads, just like they’ve traditionally used the MLS. They will also concentrate on educating the FSBO market to the advantages (larger market, contract sales force) of accepting visits from realtor-represented buyers even if they have to give up 1-3% commission. 

To give you an idea of what I mean, when Celeste and I sold our first house a few years ago I was hammering the FSBO sign in my front yard when our phone rang.  An agent happened to be driving by and asked if we would let her bring a client by to see the house.  "Sure," we said, "but we’re only paying a 2% commission."  She jumped right on it, because in reality she would have gotten only 3% anyway if we had a listing agent. 

Celeste and I sold all three of our properties without an agent,
and I can tell you that we worked harder trying to buy our house in Winston-Salem than we did to sell all three houses combined.  Admittedly we sold in a hot market, but I still think that in the end selling is easier than buying, and smart realtors will ackowledge that and focus on servicing home buyers.

My final point would be that they should not abandon listings totally.  They should just recognize that they’ve lost the monopoly, and in fact they should consider listing their properties on things like CraigsList themselves.  In other words they should really do the marketing that they’ve only been paying lip-service to up until now.  Still as a seller I don’t know that I’d be willing to give up 3% for that kind of service so they’d definitely have to consider giving up a point or two there.

Flying the Unfriendly Skies

5 Replies

Yesterday I had a 1:45 flight from Greensboro to Washington-Dulles on United.  The plane took off on time, but halfway to DC we were turned around and did an emergency landing back at Greensboro due to a faulty sensor in the cabin door. Bummer.

Back on the ground we were told to de-plane and then wait for word about the flight.  Eventually it was cancelled (about 5:00) and in the interim United’s computers went down worldwide.  That meant that no one could tell us if we’d be able to get on the next flight because they couldn’t pull up the reservation system and they couldn’t tell if the flight was full (it was).  And they couldn’t tell me if I’d have a seat this morning if I came back to the airport so I ended up renting a car and driving up.  My little one hour flight turned into a 12 hour ordeal.

Most bothersome to me was:

  • They only had one person working two gates and handling all the flights.  This poor woman (her name was Alicia) did yeoman work and never lost her cool, and she was lucky that there weren’t any really nasty passengers to deal with. Why did they leave her stranded there like that for over five or six hours?  Where was her backup, especially when she had two or three flights at a time to deal with?
  • Communication from United was terrible and almost non-existent.  The woman at the gate was using her personal cell phone to call other agents at other airports she had worked with on previous assignments to try and find out what was going on.  She might as well have been stranded on an island with the amount of communication she received from the company, and consequently we were on the same island with her.
  • How can United not have some kind of backup system for this contingency?
  • No love from United.  Last year when I had a flight out of Dulles that was delayed several hours on the soon-to-be defunct Independence Airline they brought in extra staff to deal with the passengers and they provided us with complimentary sodas and chips.  Yesterday, despite being there for over six hours no one from United even offered a drink or food voucher. Heck, no manager even came down to the gate to check things out.

I want to emphasize that the employees at United that I dealt with were all polite and as helpful as they could be. Their management hung them out to dry, and if anyone from United is reading this I can tell you that your folks were great and they never once pointed the finger at you even though they should have.

Friendly skies my butt.

Hoggard Came Home to a Party, I Came Home to Another Floater

Leave a reply

I read here that Dave Hoggard, supreme Greensboro blogger who I was privileged to meet in October at ConvergeSouth, came home on New Years Eve to a party thrown by his son (with permission).

I, on the other hand, came home on New Years Day, to find another floating turd within an hour of my arrival.  As I’ve pointed out before, I am the "Turd Man."

Better to Be Lucky Than Good

Leave a reply

I was a hair away from booking my next business trip on Independence Air out of Piedmont Triad International Airport, but I put it off until today because I wasn’t sure of my itinerary.  Today Independence announced that they are ceasing operations on January 5, 2006.  Sure, I’d have been able to get a refund, but what a pain that would have been.

So I’m flying United and it’s costing me about 50% more than it would have to fly Independence.  I would now like to officially nominate myself for the Piedmont Triad Discount Airline recruiting committee.  Unfortunately it doesn’t exist so perhaps I should just take the bull by the horns and start the darn thing myself.

Know anyone at JetBlue or SouthWest?  Personally I prefer JetBlue. Perhaps we could create an incentives package like we do for everyone else.

On another, slightly related note Ed Cone suggests that PTI offer free wi-fi.  I agree wholeheartedly.  How much can they possibly be making with their for-profit relationship with the company providing the service, and how many business travelers are they irking in the process of not making very much money? Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Winston-Salem Ledger, New Conservative Blog

1 Reply

Thanks to Ben Holder who pointed me to a new Winston-Salem blog called the Winston-Salem Ledger.  It’s a conservative-leaning blog that I think launched on December 10, 2005.

If these guys make a go of it they should make an interesting voice for Winston-Salem conservatives.  I couldn’t make out who’s running the blog, although the hosting (software) is provided by an outfit called ACT Media, which is definitely a conservative group. Their website states "Act Media, Inc and TheConservativeVoice.com are committed to advancing the conservative movement by providing free websites."  Anyone know who the "feet on the street" for the blog are here in Winston-Salem?

Have to Give the Journal Some Props

1 Reply

In the past I’ve given the Winston-Salem Journal a hard time about their online initiatives and I’ve also compared them unfavorably with the Greensboro News & Record so I feel a need to give them some props when I find something positive about their online work.

Newslink, a compilation of news sites, ranks the Journal is the third highest ranking newspaper website in North Carolina and number 85 in the US.  The News & Record is fourth in the state and 105 in the US. The two highest papers in NC are the Charlotte Observer (#20 in the US) and the Raleigh News & Observer (#43 US).  FYI, the top 5 newspaper sites in the US are:

  1. The Washington Post
  2. Los Angeles Times
  3. The New York Times
  4. Miami Herald
  5. USA Today

Even though this is not an internet-wide sample I still felt I needed to give the Journal some love. FYI, here’s how Newslink describes their rankings:

Local news sites in the United States
are ranked by the total number of times each is accessed via NewsLink by human
users of NewsLink’s publication lists. Results from the 1,000 most-accessed newspaper,
television station and radio station sites are tabulated weekly, typically on Fridays.
When sites are categorized by type, the listing employs the same listings
criteria as are used in creating NewsLink’s lists.

The ranking makes no attempt to measure the total audience served by any  site —
a number very difficult, if not impossible, to measure with any
certainty. What it does attempt to measure is the market share
currently going to each site from among a diverse audience of web users
who probably are not already habitual users of those sites. In other
words, it is more a measure of current, sponteneous interest and
potential growth among new users than it is an absolute measure of
traffic.

A strong site would doubtlessly have a core of habitual
readers who would simply go directly to the site rather than "find" it
through other links. This list measures how many people seek out sites
that have not already been bookmarked or memorized. This is an
important factor since one-time use of a site has about a 45 percent
market share while habitual site use has only a 13 percent market
share, according to other research.

With about half a million unique individual users monthly
and upwards of a quarter of a million links off our site weekly, the
NewsLink audience whose behavior is tracked by this ranking is composed
largely of non-journalists, including a large number of new-to-the-web
users. The audience does tend to be overly representative of people one
might call "opinion leaders" — politicians, executives, professionals, non-journalism educators, media relations people and the like.

My College Degree is Worth Less Today

Leave a reply

I’m sitting here on Christmas Eve doing a little reading and I just came across this post (Business Week) about how the real wages of those with college degrees has declined for the fourth straight year.  I can’t say that I find it surprising, but it is a little depressing.  I’d say that it is evidence that today’s college degree is equivalent to a high school degree in my parents’ day.  Back in "the day" you could be pretty certain that you could get a good job with a high school degree, but as the US economy shifted away from manufacturing and towards "knowledge work" it became more important to have the skills equated with a college degree.

Of equal interest to me was a comment attached to the blog post that was written by someone who obviously graduated from college in the 70s with a degree from a liberal arts college.  She blurted  that old saw about how going to college isn’t about making more money it’s about being able to ask questions, expand your mind, etc.  Then she said that she’d recently been an adjunct professor at a state college in the south and all the students cared about was passing the test, not "learning", and if that was indicative of today’s students then colleges are in trouble.

That cracked me up.  Does she really believe that students in the 70s were that different?  I guarantee you there were as many students just looking to pass the test in her day, but maybe she didn’t know them or hang out with them. Her observations about college in the 70s were just as anecdotal as those about today’s students.  And does she really think that college is just about expanding your mind for the sake of expanding your mind?  No, it’s learning how to think so that you can be more successful later in life (notice I didn’t say wealthier, although that’s often a consequence of being more successful) and essentially a more productive contributor to society.  Believe me, if the average student didn’t expect a positive economic impact from earning their degree they wouldn’t go to college.

And let’s not forget about networking.  As another commenter to the post said it isn’t what you know, it’s who you know.  While that’s simplistic it is partly true.  If two qualified people are in the running for a position or a deal then if one person has a personal connection to the decision maker then they have an inside track.  There’s no doubt that you begin the "who do you know" game in college and it definitely provides a leg up in your professional life.

Unfortunately, it seems from the data provided by the post’s author that the old BA/BS is less valuable today than it was five years ago.  Still, I’d certainly rather have a less valuable BA than none at all.

Mark Cuban Comes Up With a Very Relevant Statistic

2 Replies

Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA franchise, is one smart dude.  He’s also a pain in the butt to the other NBA owners, but I think that’s more because he is willing to rock the boat and ask hard questions than because of his almost instant success reviving down-and-out franchise.

Mr. Cuban asked a question that I can’t believe has not been asked before: What is a team’s won-loss record in the second game when that game is played the day immediately following another game?  In other words what is a teams record in the second game of a back-to-back?  He recruited Elias Sports Bureau to help him come up with the answer, which is pretty interesting (W-L records of each NBA team over the last few years are at the bottom of the post).  He also is looking at the teams’ records in the last game they play when they play four games in five days, but he doesn’t have the W-L in the post.

My question is whether or not this is new information.  From the post I gather that it is, so my next question is how can all the people managing NBA teams not already know this?  I’d think it would behoove them to know this kind of stuff so that they can take steps to try and alleviate the problem.  From trying to negotiate better stadium deals to prevent the need for this kind of scheduling to figuring out ways to help the players deal with the situation when it arises you would think they would want this kind of data to back them up when they make requests/demands for the sake of the team (when negotiating with stadium owners) and the owners (when trying to justify expenditures on behalf of players who already make gobs of money).

I guess that’s what makes Mr. Cuban so smart; he asks the questions that no one else even thinks of.

“Dad, what’s a master debater?”

3 Replies

Yesterday was the last day of school for my kids before the Christmas holidays so my daughter, Erin,  invited two friends to sleep over.  Last night I was working on my computer and the girls were on the kids’ computer which is also in my office.  They found some website that was dedicated to kittens so I had to endure a seemingly endless string of "Oooooh, he’s so cute" coming from three sixth grade girls.  Then, after about 10 minutes of this Erin suddenly asks me, "Dad, what’s a master debater?"  What follows was our discussion:

Me: "Huh?"
Erin: "What’s a master debater?"
Me: "What do you mean?"
Erin: "Well it says here that any time someone master-debates a kitten dies so I was wondering what a master-debater is."
Me: Chin on floor.
Erin: "Well, what is it?  Is it a bad thing?"
Me: "I don’t want to talk about it right now."
Erin: "So it’s a bad thing?"
Me: "It’s a play on words, but it’s not something I’m gonna talk about right now."
Erin: "Okay."
Erin, to her friends: "When Dad won’t talk about it that means it’s bad and probably something about sex."
Me: Trying to type, but have no idea what I was typing.

The girls quickly moved on to something else and forgot all about it. I however couldn’t forget it.  I had visions of the girls’ dads showing up at my door and belting me in the nose for their daughters being exposed to ‘master-debater’ on my turf.  Yikes!

I don’t know how this happened but over the last few years I’ve become the de facto birds-and-the-bees speech-giver in this family.  A couple of years ago I was sitting in the car with the kids while Celeste ran into the grocery store to get milk and bread.  In the five minutes she was in there I managed to get cornered into giving the whole "how babies happen" speech after Erin informed her brothers that she would never kiss a boy because she didn’t want to get pregnant.  She was operating on the assumption that she had a multitude of eggs stored in her belly and that a kiss was like watering those eggs and causing one to grow.  So much for the much-vaunted "You and Your Body" class the kids had at school.  Anyway, when Celeste got back in the car she took one look at me and asked, "What happened."  I felt like I’d been hit by a truck.

And just last week my oldest son, who’s in 7th grade, laughingly told me and his siblings about a boy who had to get up in front of his class to do a presentation with a full tent-effect going on in his drawers.  That led to a private half-hour conversation between Michael and me that began with why it’s inappropriate to talk about that kind of stuff at dinner (and in front of his 9 year old brother) and progressed into practical advice on handling such situations for himself in the future.

I told Celeste (my wife) about the master-debater incident and she agreed that I seem to be the one who gets stuck with all these questions/issues.  We also decided that she needed to have a little talk with Erin since there’s no way I’m talking about master-debation with my daughter. 

It’s times like these that I wonder if I can resign my commission as a dad.  We definitely don’t get paid enough for this.