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Blogs

Bloggers: How to Give Yourself a Raise Today

by Christian Russell | October 22, 2009

The thing I love about running my internet business is that if things are awesome, I can gloat a little bit and revel in my own genius. And when things suck, I have no one to blame but myself. Make no mistake about it, if you make the decision to run your own company you’re going to experience a little of both ;)

The cool thing is that by running a blog you can give yourself a raise anytime you want. How is this done? It’s done by paying attention to the little details. This isn’t my favorite thing to do, but it’s necessary from time to time.

Some prerequisites

First things first. In order to implement the detail-tweaking recommendations I will give you here in a minute, it’s essential to first have a couple things in place. Without these two prerequisites, you aren’t going to get much fruit from your labor.

  1. Be working in a niche where you have actual expertise or something valuable to offer.
  2. Have a responsive readership. Not necessarily a large readership (what is LARGE, anyway? Large according to who?), but you need to have a community of readers that actually read your stuff and pay attention to what you’re doing.
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Blogs

Has the Real Estate Supertanker Finally Turned?

by Richard Warren | August 31, 2009

For the past several years it seems that every time you ran into a real estate agent he would proclaim that the market was at the bottom and it was time to buy. Of course, that was nothing more than the agent’s vested interest speaking. The market continued to slide in just about every city. Some fared worse than others, but few areas of the country were spared.

Supertanker

Many inexperienced and even some veteran investors have an expectation that the real estate market can turn on a dime in the manner of a speedboat. Perhaps they think it’s more like the stock market, which can swing wildly from one trading session to the next. However, real estate is more like a supertanker in that it takes a long time to change course. The reason for that is simply the lack of instant liquidity and the time it takes to complete each transaction.

Recent Data

There is good news. The latest report from the Case-Shiller U.S National Home price Index shows that real estate prices have shown their first quarterly increase in three years. Does that mean that the bear market in real estate prices is over? Not by a long shot. There are many foreclosures on the horizon and the national economy is still hurting. However, it’s a start.

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Blogs

What If We Had A Mortgage Mediation Party And Nobody Came?

by Richard Warren | August 17, 2009

The Nevada State Legislature recently passed the mortgage mediation law great fanfare. The law was expected to save as many as 17,000 Nevada homeowners from foreclosure. The law, which went into effect July 1st, allows homeowners in default to request a mediation hearing with the lender.

Nevada CapitolTo be eligible a homeowner must have received a notice of default after July 1, 2009. The homeowner must pay a fee of $200 if they request a hearing and the lender is also required to pay a $200 fee. In anticipation of a flood of requests, the state has trained in excess of 100 lawyers and ex-judges to handle the cases.

Where is Everybody?

The official estimates were that between 1,250 and 1,500 homeowners per month would participate in the program. However, after six weeks there have been a total of ten requests. Not ten per day or ten per week, just ten total. That amounts to 1.67 requests per week! How did they get it so wrong?

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Blogs

Light At The End Of The Tunnel?

by Richard Warren | August 3, 2009
Dog Tunnel
There are plenty of mixed signals on the economy today. Each bad report is followed by something good only to be followed yet again by something negative. This is actually a good thing. It wasn’t that long ago that the news was almost universally bad. The mixed signals are actually a sign that things may really be improving.
The housing numbers for June were positive in terms of sales with new construction reporting a gain of 11% and re-sales posting a 4% increase. The flip side shows that prices were still falling. Some of these sales can certainly be attributed to the $8,000 first-time buyer tax credit, but they’re still sales. So we have the good and the bad, but it is nowhere near as ugly.

More Pain to Come

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Blogs

What The Yellow Pages Can Tell You About The Economy

by Richard Warren | July 27, 2009
 
“The new phone books are here, the new phone books are here!”That was a line from Steve Martin in the movie The Jerk, heDex YP was finally “somebody” because his name was in the phonebook. Well, today I received the latest edition of the Dex yellow pages directory for Las Vegas. Without even opening it, I saw a snapshot of the local economy.
 
 Las Vegas was a city that was growing so fast that the yellow pages were published twice a year, January and July, the only market in the country to do so. There were so many new businesses opening up that the publisher, R.H. Donnelley, felt that they couldn’t make someone wait as long as twelve months to advertise. With each edition the book was bigger and heavier as more and more businesses advertised.
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Blogs

Collateral Credit Damage

by Richard Warren | July 13, 2009

There was a very interesting article here on the Real Estate Dispatch last week. It was by Tom Koziol on the topic of consumer credit scoring models (article). I found it interesting because just one day earlier I was speaking to a friend of my who is an independent auto broker. She was telling me [...]

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Blogs

Pity The Retail Seller

by Richard Warren | May 25, 2009

Home sales in many markets are dominated by bank REOs, or Real Estate Owned as foreclosures are called after they have gone back to the bank. Generally these REOs will sell below market and can be a great deal for the buyer. However in areas that have an overabundance of REOs they do not sell [...]

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Blogs

What Do You Mean Money Doesn’t Grow On Trees?

by Richard Warren | May 18, 2009

 
As a young boy (way too many years ago) whenever I wanted something that was outrageously expensive my mother would say, “sure, I’ll go out back and pick some cash off of the money tree.” This was, of course, a variation of the adage that money doesn’t grow on trees. Ah, if only it did.
Unfortunately [...]

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Blogs

An Inflated Appraisal Scheme With A Twist

by Richard Warren | May 11, 2009

Most people have heard of schemes in which a lender is defrauded by someone who uses an inflated appraisal to obtain a loan for much more than a house is worth. This type of scam generally requires the cooperation of several people. In addition to the person running the scam you need an appraiser who [...]

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Blogs

Builders Lower Prices To Compete With REOs

by Richard Warren | May 4, 2009

I feel like I just stepped out of a time machine after travelling back to 2003. That was when I first moved to Las Vegas from New York. The real estate market hadn’t reached the bubble phase yet but the market was strong. Entry level new homes were selling for about $90 per square foot [...]

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Blogs

When A Lender Reneges On A Pre-Approval

by Richard Warren | April 27, 2009

                                          
It has become common for builders and real estate agents to require a pre-qualification or pre-approval from a lender prior to working with them on the purchase of a home. This is done so that the builder or agent doesn’t spend a lot of time with someone who will not be able to get a [...]

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Blogs

Back To Reality, Foreclosure Moratorium Ends

by Richard Warren | April 20, 2009

I had been hearing a lot of talk lately about how home foreclosures were down. Real estate agents were pointing to this and saying that the market was going to turn around soon. Even the talking heads on the late night news were reporting that foreclosure filings were down and things were going to get better. Could [...]

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Blogs

The Boy Who Cried “Bottom”

by Richard Warren | April 13, 2009

 It seems that for the last two years I have heard one phrase uttered repeatedly. At real estate club meetings, by the spin-doctors of the Government or the spokespersons for various real estate groups it seems to be a constant refrain: “we are at the bottom of the market.” It has certainly been a long [...]

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Blogs

Creating Equity Where There Is None

by Richard Warren | April 6, 2009

We are constantly hearing about homeowners who are upside-down on their homes. The only hope that they seem to have is doing a short-sale, or getting the bank to agree to take less than the amount owed. Frequently no buyer can be found and the home winds up in foreclosure. That is especially true here [...]

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Blogs

Stop Paying Useless SEO Companies to Promote Your Website!

by Joshua Dorkin | March 25, 2009

Log into the blog . . . check comments . . . remove useless SEO comments . . .
A Look at SEO Blog Comments that Will Sink Your Company
Getting SPAM comments on your blog is certainly an annoying thing, particularly because of all of the filters on blogs these days, but more annoying, in my [...]

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