The emotion of fear is a gradient scale that starts at simple, garden variety “worry”, at the lowest level and goes up to a high level of terror.  At the highest levels of fear the body will literally shut down.   The emotion of fear is built-in to the body from a long time back as a survival mechanism (the fight-or-flight response).  If you have a mental fear the body will respond.  Any real or imagined threat to survival can produce this response.  However, possibly having less money (which is a survival point in the current society) is not likely to cause death.  But many people will get a mental and physical reaction to being laid off, fired or receiving less money that is not much different than if life itself was about to end.

If there was ever a question about stock market prices ever being based on anything other than greed and fear that question had to have been answered in the past two days.  Oh-my-god-congress-didn’t-pass-the-bailout-bill-sell-everything.  Good-news-it-looks-like-they-will-work-it-out-my-stock-is-valuable-again. 

Good grief.

This isn’t the end.  The four horseman are not mounted and riding - I make that statement fully realizing that folks wearing suits who are on TV or work for the Federal Government are saying this is the worst possible situation.  Blah, blah, blah.  In case you missed it over at Bloodhoundblog, see this for a good laugh.

This is only about money.  Money that was spent by people who didn’t earn it and who didn’t have it.  One of the primary laws of finance is that income must be greater than outgo.  Sounds simple.  So simple it is routinely ignored:  by individuals, companies and governments.  The United States is the richest, most powerful nation on the face of the earth.  More so than any nation has ever been in all of recorded history - even Rome, when all roads lead there.  And yet, our country - with all of it’s riches and all of it’s resources has been spending more than it has been earning.  The current “meltdown” is just the house of cards that was there all along, falling down.  You can’t lose what you didn’t have.  We haven’t “lost something” so much as we discovered we didn’t have something.  To paraphrase Winston Churchill’s statement on democracy, the bailout is the worst possible solution, except for all the others.

Some say if we don’t do the bailout we could have a depression.  Not a recession, a depression.  Truth is we could have a giant recession or even a depression if we do the bailout.  And I’m writing this to make you feel better.  It is just money.  That’s all, money.  No matter what happens, it isn’t the end of life as we know it.  You want to survive.  Me too.  A simple way to accurately predict how a person will behave or fare in the future is to look at their past pattern.  How did they do before?  How do they tend to handle things?  Do they tend to screw things up no matter what?  Or do they tend to land on their feet - always finding some way to make things go right?  That is always the ultimate test of any being: The ability to MAKE things go right.  Not “are things right?  The ability to make them right.  Don’t you usually so just that?  So what makes this all that different?  The suits from the government and TV yip yapping about this mess like they know what they are talking about?  If they knew what they are talking about we wouldn’t have this mess. 

No no.  It isn’t that I have faith in the people “fixing” this - it is that I have real faith and confidence in man’s survival drive - your survival drive.   Something really bad?  September 11th, 2001, New York City.  Yet, here we are.  If you insist on having something awful to worry about at least have the good sense to move it off of the subject of money.  Money does not equal life.  Worry about (I’m not really wanting you to do this!) World War III.  This small little planet is composed of an anarchy of nations armed with nuclear warheads.  Potential mid-east conflicts alone could bring about the end of life as we know it.  If you must concentrate on “something awful” - use that one.  But let me suggest, if you have managed to make it through the past few weeks without losing sleep over that one - skip the bailout, as well.

The question, what turns your dial isn’t nearly as important as who.  Who turns your dial?  And hopefully, the answer to that question - at least most of the time - is you.

From the Department of Homeland Stupidity comes the newly formed Department of Bailouts.  Is there now a sufficient level of converting the United States into a socialist economy for the New Regime President (aka, Treasury Secretary Paulson) to feel that his work is done?

But the above isn’t my special area of expertise.  Showing fellow agents how to have a truly successful business is what I am known for.  And I find it funny (odd?) when I read something that directly contradicts what I know to be true on that particular subject.  It certainly isn’t the first time I’ve seen, "getting listings is no longer the best way to go" - just the first time I’ve seen it from someone I respect as much as I respect Brian Brady.  He wrote:

Thirty years ago, the mantra “listers last” was all important advice to a new real estate agent.  Today, inventory has been democratized through the IDX search on a website.   Open houses then, are a good time to work on your SEO.  A REALTOR who controls the SERPS rather than the inventory should profit best from this buyer-centric market.

Okay, fine.  But can anyone name even four or five TOP AGENTS who have buyer based businesses?  I personally know a couple of them.  But I don’t know of any top agent who has had a buyer based (as opposed to a listings based) business who did it for 3 - 4 consecutive years.  Can an agent attract buyers via the internet?  Absolutely.  Can it be done at a level so great that the lead agent (rainmaker) hires many many many buyer agents to handle the load?  Again, the answer is a confirmed yes.  However, the web traffic - at that level - isn’t normally achieved through SEO but pay per click.  All of the huge buyer based operations I know of in the U.S. use PPC to attract the traffic.  Not saying SEO doesn’t enter into it but the bulk of it is PPC.

How many of them have done it or will be able to maintain their performance level for even three years?  I can’t say, as it (at least to my knowledge) hasn’t ever been done for that long.  Which is my main point.  Almost all top agents have a listings based business.  I am not saying this because I have a listings based business, I am saying it because that is what I found when I went looking at the profiles and the patterns of top agents.  What I observed is what caused me to decide to take the path I took - become a lister.  I have never seen any confirmed data (vs opinions)that contradicts that.

There is nothing I am writing here that suggests that selling homes to buyers (as we need at least one for every listing!) is bad or should not be done.  Oddly, by accident, I am one of the leading buyer side agents (based on number of sales) in the Phoenix market.  I discovered that odd fact a little over a year ago.  I had been working for years to find out what the "top buyer agents" were doing so I could start doing it too.  Once I realized that I wasn’t way behind everyone else but ahead of most everyone I stopped trying to "discover" what I must already know.  Our buyer sides came about as a result of marketing our listings.  Period.  Just doing the things that should be done to properly market a listing produced buyer deals.  Lots of them.

An interesting post I came across about a month ago was over at the always-worth-reading, Notorious R.O.B.  There was a discussion regarding possible violation of a listing agent’s fiduciary duty to have their listings on Zillow, Trulia, etc.  Seems several different lawyers were of the opinion that it could possibly violate a listing agent’s duty to his seller.  I disagree.  Completely.  From my comments to that post on Rob Hahn’s site:

There will always be plaintiffs and lawyers litigating for various reasons. I can not say any lawsuit over which websites a listing was posted on should not occur. I can say that any lawsuit brought for those reasons is without merit. It would have be based on the (erroneous) premise that inquiries from those various sites actually directly helped or caused a home to sell.

The top national site for traffic is Realtor.com. I currently pay about $4,000 a year to “enhance” my listings. There was a time that every 20 leads from Realtor.com equaled a closed escrow on *a* home. Seldom the one they inquired about. Now, the *only* reason I am on Realtor.com is to be able to say to our sellers that “we feature your home on Realtor.com”. That is the ONLY reason. In the past four years, I have never sold a listing because it was on Realtor.com, Trulia, Zillow or any of the other sites. I have sold homes to buyers because we received an email lead because we have a lot of listings on those sites. Big difference.

If you are wanting buyer leads those sites may or may not be good. If you want to “impress” your sellers, they can be very good. If you want to actually sell that house I don’t see that they make *any* difference.

All of my listings are on all of the important sites.  We do receive some inquiries from nearly all of them and some of those inquiries can become actual leads where we make a sale.  I’m not convinced that today’s "internet lead" is much different than the "ad call" of twenty-five years ago.  The best data I had at the time was it took about 400 calls (on the average) regarding a particular home to physically sell that home to that buyer.  If you only have a few listings and sometimes sell one it can seem like it does not take that many.  Get a few thousand and keep track of them and you see a different picture.  If this were not true I suspect that most of us would be out of a job - as most sellers could just run an ad (or today, get "internet leads") and sell their own home.

My main points in this post are:

1. Listings were, are and will continue to be the very best method of having a stable real estate practice.

2. There are huge amounts of fantastic nonsense available from lots of different places regarding what is necessary to sell homes.

3.  People who can’t see clearly will continue to disagree with point # 1 and therefore continue to attempt to sell the nonsense mentioned in point # 2 as essential.

Nonsense.

The Homeowner Rescue Bill Rescues Fannie and Freddie Investors.  I don’t see any other groups being rescued.

Normally I don’t find it difficult to disagree with President George W. Bush about pretty much everything (save the curvature of the earth and that humans should breathe oxygen).  This time it is different.  Bush had to have been ashamed to have signed it.  Just look at how it is buried on this page.  Arizona Senator John Kyl was one of the 13 dissenting votes.  Kyl even called a close Realtor friend of mine here in Arizona to explain why he could not vote for it - that it was simply an awful piece of legislation.  It is supposed to help save 400,000 people from going into foreclosure.  If that was really the purpose, considering how much it will cost (800 billion dollars), It would have been a lot cheaper to have a lottery and simply select the 400,000 supposed lucky ones and just buy their home for them.

But that really isn’t the purpose at all.  It is the Fannie Mae -  Freddie Mac Bail Out Bill.  That is why Bush signed it.  He accepted all that other crap so he could do what he had to do to keep Fannie & Freddie afloat.  What I don’t understand is why (in the final form it passed in) the NAR backed it.  Unless we are to assume that anything that gives any Realtor anything is “good” - no matter the cost, this one just makes no sense.

My office already has had sellers who need to do a short sale either take their home off the market or fail to let agents and buyers show their house.  No need.  The government is here to help them.  If foreclosures are estimated to be in the range of 5.5 million between now and the end of 2010 how does “fixing it” for 400,000 solve anything?  And don’t be surprised if there aren’t 400k people (not counting FNMA and FRE stockholders) who get helped at all.  I predict less than half of the estimated 400,000 will have anything other than foreclosure or a short sale occur.

The change that will hurt the Phoenix market the most is the complete elimination of the AmeriDream and Nehemiah programs.  Effective, October 1st - they are gone.  Currently, those seller-funded down payment assistance home sales account for about half of all the homes being sold here.  If it had to go away, now of all times?  Homeowner Rescue Bill, my ass.

Loads of other stuff.  Thanks for nothing, Barney.