But we’re doing things differently than we were last November. And I took up the topic of scene creation in public in Seattle both Thursday and Friday. On Friday, I promised to cook up newer, better documentation by Monday.

I’m a day early. Click on this link to be swept off to a comprehensive site on how — and why — to create a public Scenius.net scene.

The site features three videos, including a link to the one made by Jim Reppond at Friday’s presentation.

There are also links to some of the pages mentioned in the first video, which is intended to be the canonical scene creation reference, as well as links to BloodhoundBlog posts on the how and why of Scenius scenes.

Let me know when you create a new public scene and I will add it to the index at Scenius.net.

I’ve thought a lot about Rain Man over the past few months as I’ve been following the press coverage of the sub-prime mortgage crisis. The story’s been on the front page of the Wall Street Journal nearly every day. Pretty much every show on CNBC — except Kudlow & Co.and one or two others — has been obsessed with the topic. Yet no one seems to be asking the Rain Man question: “How big is the sub-prime mortgage market?”

 

And the answer, as Ben Stein makes clear, is not very big at all.

Currently there are about 44 million mortgages in the U.S., and less than 14 percent of them are sub-prime. And only about 13 percent of those are late on payments, with the majority of late payers working through their problems with the banks.

So, all in all, when you work through the details and get down to the number that really matters, only about 0.6 percent of U.S. mortgages are currently in foreclosure. That’s up a hair from roughly 0.5 percent last year. That’s it.

 More at BloodhoundBlog...

Surely BloodhoundBlog is not the nerdliest joint on the RE.net, but we’ve still got a lot of arrows in our quiver — er, pocket protector.

For a start, I pinned the tail on Redfin, arguing that nerdy INTx geeks are in fact their target market. (Sing along: “I’m fluent in JavaScript as well as Klingon.”) Kris Berg snagged an interview with Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman, himself a palpably INTx specimen. We have to sit on her podcast until Thursday, but Kelman’s confirmation that the brokerage target markets techno-geeks is not an embargoed tidbit.

Kris had a great Redfin post of her own as did husband Steve Berg at The San Diego Home Blog.

And: I did geek-seeking missile duty by awarding the first Cheez Whiz Prize to a dead-pool destined circle jerk called my-currency.com. What did the starving mathematicians say when they stumbled onto a can of beans? “First we will postulate a can-opener…”

But just to establish my own hopeless geek bona fides, this week I became the first hopeless geek to write a song about real estate weblogging. “Cathy’s Clown” indeed!

But, Dave, I’m just a wave. I ain’t the water. So here’s what else has been going on in the BloodhoundBlog pond:

Investor Michael Cook took us along on his trip to Greensboro, NC, advising us thatTime Really is Money and asking What makes a good investment? He follows up by naming some Watchouts for New Market Investing and then invites us to considerBank Relationships vs. Mortgage Brokers.

In Googling for Pizza Kris Berg takes us on a very straightforward roundabout route through the SEO benefits of real estate weblogging.

Also on the theme of weblogging, Jeff Brown argues against the practice of allowing anonymous comments in It’s Time To Take The Lead — Let’s Turn The Lights On Now. Anonymous commenters are still permitted at BloodhoundBlog, but we’ve had to put everyone on a very short leash to avoid flaming, obscenity, etc. It’s common for people to argue that policing comments is “censorship.” This is incorrect. Censorship is something that is done by governments. The issue here is the right of private property owners to maintain the quality of life they desire on their own property. Each one of us retains the perfect right to behave however we want on our own property or on public property. But pseudonymous cretins have no right to behave badly on our property, at our expense. Civilization is not a suicide pact.

But don’t get the idea that we didn’t talk about real estate. Jeff also reminds us thatThe Retirement Clock Is Counting Down, and he tells us all about something he almost never does: Attending The Closing.

Brian Brady led off the week with A Selfish Case for National Originator Licensing. Brian was also observed Peeking into Bernanke’s Crystal Ball.

Jeff Turner, who apparently cannot hit the ball unless it’s out of the park, weighed in with Transparency And The Wizard Of Oz.

We had another Russell Shaw podcast Exploring the mind of a mega-producer. Best news: Interviewer Tim Harris promises us six more podcasts with top-producing Realtors.

We’re not all Realtors, but we have a lot of Realtors writing here. Russell Shaw might be the most conservative, and it’s arguable that I am the most radical — although that honor could easily go to Doug Quance. But we are all of us interested in reforms that will make the real estate industry more transparent, more efficient, and, one may hope, better respected.

Even so, we are insiders, and we cannot but see the real estate business as insiders. I went on a mild tear over a particularly difficult transaction I had close this week: Overcharging? A dedicated Realtor is a bargain. In the ensuing discussion, I amended this: Whatever it takes: A determined Realtor is a bargain.

Michael Cook riposted from an investor’s and consumer’s point of view with A Different Perspective on the Value of Realtors and If there is no Realtor monopoly — then what explains the commission structure?

I followed up with a fuller rendering of the story of my difficult transaction in A line in the sand: Gaius Popillius Laenas and getting the real estate transaction closed against all opposition. And, taking account of all of this and then some, long-ball hitter Jeff Turner followed up with Let Ideas Kill Themselves.

The posts themselves are interesting, of course, but so are the extended commentary threads. We have our geeky INTx side, but we are a range of personalities. The simple fact is, some of the most interesting real estate discussions on the RE.net take place every week on BloodhoundBlog. Give us your thoughtful attention and we’ll repay it with ours…

BloodhoundBlog tends very strongly to cover news and views of interest to real estate professionals nationwide. And — guess what? — our audience, by an overwhelming majority, consists of real estate professionals nationwide.

Here’s the bad news: If you have a real estate weblog, the chances are excellent that your objective is to attract interest from buyers and sellers in your local market. But — guess what? — your audience, by an overwhelming majority, very probably consists of real estate professionals nationwide.

Why should this be so?

There are three reasons:

First, the permanent audience for real estate weblogs consists of real estate professionals all over the country — all over the Anglosphere, really, those countries most strongly influenced by the English language, its customs and traditions.

Second, to the extent that consumers are finding your real estate weblog by long tail search terms, they are evanescent — fleeting. For one thing, their interest in buying or selling a home has a limited time window; when they’re done, most of them are done for a long while. And, for another, they’re flitting in and out from Google just as you do, when you’re searching from something on-line.

But third, and most importantly, you don’t have a local audience because you are not cultivating a local audience.

This year portends to be the Year of the Locality in real estate weblogs. Active Rain is starting a new site call Localism.com, which is to be devoted to engendering very high long tail organic search engine rankings for locality and neighborhood-level keywords. MyHouseKey.org, to debut this week, is pursuing the same strategy.

These are not awful ideas, but they’re not great, either. As with your current conundrum, a long tail searcher is apt to be ephemeral, landing on and lasting at your weblog only an instant.

The better plan, I think, is to get local consumers to come and stay, to come and come back, to favorite your weblog, to — O, holy of holies! — blogroll your real estate weblog.

I have two ideas on how to do this, one great and one insanely great. I’ll share the great one, but my plan is to hoard the insanely great notion until I can implement it myself. That fact is, I thought of both of these ideas last Summer, and it did not occur to me to blog about either until Brian Brady’s weblogging salon yesterday.

Indeed: Duh!

[continue reading at BloodhoundBlog]