I find it disturbing on many levels.

Once upon a time, I had an advanced writing professor in undergraduate school that said these things are complicated, but there is no shame in having it occur – it happens to everyone. Her solution was to eat a lamb chop with a side of beans and a bowl of pudding or perhaps a nice beignet for desert. Eggplant is to be avoided. However, anything is better covered in Sriracha sauce, so it is to be applied liberally (perhaps not on the pudding though).

Actually, that’s not even remotely close to what Dr. Marks suggested. She said the best cure was to ask someone for two words or phrases – any two words or phrases – and to write something that incorporated those words.

So I asked my “friends” on Twitter to send me some words and phrases.

They are a very creative bunch, and they’re pretty funny. Practically circus clowns even. I told them I’d recycle their musings into something about real estate.

If you haven’t already guessed, the words in bold in this post were the suggested words and phrases. Apparently my pals are obsessed with food products. While part of me wants to wreak vengeance upon them (try using “wreak” properly in a sentence without following it with “havoc”…), in all honesty doing that would be a fallacy. While we may have irreconcilable differences, the simple fact is, these are not flabby sharks, they are human beings, and I like them. Don’t believe that? Check my galvanic skin response and see if I’m lying.

Now before someone gets their panties in a wad, I realize I have yet to really say anything real estate related.

Work with me people.

I could have taken the easy way out and said how a short sale may not be a relevant property or a  sound investment. Ditto for a foreclosure. Or that loss mitigation officers at lending institutions are illogical. Not only can they be illogical, half the time I expect to get an email from them loudly proclaiming “All your base are belong to us. You are on the way to destruction!”.

Want to talk about landscaping? We could discuss the merits of the date palm or watering cycles for citrus trees.  Or the importance of a grand entry, or a big sky view. How about the benefits of being close to a soccer field for little Johnny and Sally? Perhaps we should chat about the need for quality flypaper in the summertime, or properly chlorinating your pool to keep the Kermit the froggy away.

But where’s the beef in that?

Wouldn’t it be better to discuss how no Home Owners Association will let you park a convertible dirigible on the street? Or perhaps we could get really deep and profound and discuss the cognitive dissonance a real estate agent experiences when the Code of Ethics they pledge to uphold conflicts with their innate desire to beat the crap out of a fellow agent that can’t find their ass with two hands and a GPS.

On that note, it’s time to end this nonsense. I’ve got appointments to make. It is, in effect, time to make the donuts. Carpe Diem!

And thanks for this little indulgence. It actually did help clear that weird blockage. And if you didn’t appreciate it, well, about all I can say is bite me.

Hat tip to these Twitter peeps:

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Long time readers will know that I occasionally go off on a rant or three. Often about things seemingly non-real estate related (like towing scams, though I would argue that any sort of community news or happening is very much real estate related).

Anyway, looking back over the last few posts, I see a little trend of what could be perceived as just wee bit of negativity. Heck, my good friend Howard Arnoff of Charleston Real Estate said this in a comment a few days ago:

Jay, you’ve been in attack mode for a couple of days, part time agents, lack of pictures (but I couldn’t agree more).

Who or what are you going after next

And that was before the whole Mill Avenue towing thing blew up.

So today’s post will be about puppies and bunnies (literally and metaphorically). Let’s face it, you don’t get much cuter and sweeter than puppies and bunnies. Unless you’ve got a heart of stone (or the mind of a serial killer), you can’t look at that photo up above and not smile and think “Aww, how freaking cute is that?”

(Incidentally, that photo is used with permission from Warren Photographic in the UK. They have some very cool work there. Give them a visit.)

Puppies and bunnies make me smile. Real estate makes me smile most of the time. The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and the Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that provide me the freedom to say what I think on this very blog – the good, the bad and the ugly – make me grin from ear to ear.

My friends and especially my family are way better than puppies and bunnies. So is a nice medium-rare steak with a frosty beer. Events like Ignite Phoenix, #EVFN and the amazing friends I’ve met in the Phoenix “social media community” pretty much blow away even puppies and bunnies. Ditto for me RE.net pals.

Wanna know another cool puppy and bunny moment? Getting emails from a Tempe police detective and the Tempe Community Relations Manager, a call from a Tempe Councilmember and the Mayor of Tempe all expressing the same frustration I have over the towing mess. Heck, even the guys at Monster’s impound lot must like puppies and bunnies as they were some pretty nice guys. There are puppies and bunnies to be found everywhere.

Let’s face it. Sometimes life sucks. Sometimes you have to deal with negative people, lousy service, general incompetence, a shitty real estate market and even getting scammed and ripped off.

Most of life though really is filled with puppies and bunnies. Those are the things you enjoy, and the things that make life worth living.

So if life’s bringing you down, if you find yourself letting the negative waves put you off, then get out there and pet a puppy and kiss a bunny or something.

Fear not. This blog isn’t changing to be some pie-in-the-sky let’s gather ‘round the campfire and sing Kumbaya kind of place. You’ll still get the straight scoop and my unadulterated opinion whether you like it or not. I ain’t sugar-coating nothing.

But today is puppy and bunny day!

So enjoy it damn it.

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Today, all of us recovered our cars from the impound lot. Since I had no idea it was “cash only”, I didn’t actually pay the $135 fee yet. I did get my car with a clear verbal warning that if I don’t pay in two weeks, it will be reported to credit bureaus and a collection agency where fees will “at least triple” the charges.

I strongly feel that the lot isn’t properly marked with warning signs, so I did a little more research, and went back to the “scene of the crime” to take some photos and measurements.

I’ve been told by a City of Tempe official that the signs posted by the property owner follow city code in their placement, quantity and location.

I disagree.

Granted, I am not an attorney nor a policy maker. But I can read, and some of the Tempe City Code with regard to the notice to the public of the right to two seems very specific and clear to me.

Let’s take a look at Tempe City Code section 32-6 Towing from Private Property / Notice to public of right to tow. I’ll break it down to bite-sized nuggets of love… all emphasis in citations is mine.

Section 32-6 (a): The owner or person in possession of any private parking area shall be deemed to have given consent to unrestricted parking by the general public in such parking area unless such parking area is posted with signs as prescribed by this section which are clearly visible and readable from a distance of fifty (50) feet away and at all points of entry.

…and at all points of entry.

Here is a photo of what any reasonable person would consider a point of entry into the lot:

The tow warning sign is on the BACK of the green electrical box.  This is “clearly visible at the point of entry”??

…clearly visible and readable from a distance of fifty (50) feet away…

Here is the sign on the back of the box from approximately 50 feet away. You tell me, is this readable?

Moving right along…

Section 32 – 6 (b) Signs will be a minimum of twelve (12) inches by eighteen (18) inches in size and will be mounted at a minimum height of five (5) feet and a maximum height of ten (10) feet above the ground.

Pictures tell the story… here is the sign shown above. Of note, this is the specific sign repeatedly referred to by both the towing company and the Tempe Police Department last night when we converged on the lot only to find our cars had been towed off.

This sign is 6 inches wide by just under 12 inches long. The bottom of the sign is 3 feet 10 inches above ground level.

A little math… a 6” x 12” sign = 72 square inches. The minimum size per city code would be a sign of 216 square inches. This sign is therefore 33% of the required minimum size. Yes, it is one-third the size required by Tempe City Code (and it’s mounted too low. The top of the electrical box is the minimum height of five feet).

But wait, there’s more!

Section 32-6 (a)(5) Each sign shall state, "Tempe City Code, Section 32-6."

Shall. Not “should”, or “ought to”. Shall means it WILL.

Here’s a close up of the fine print:

Ok, so let’s assume that the sign behind the box at the main entrance doesn’t count. How you could disregard it completely and say it doesn’t matter is beyond me. But let’s pretend.

There are two other towing warning signs posted at the lot.

Here is one that is in the middle of the south end of the lot, approximately 160 feet from the main entrance.

Hey! It’s of the minimum 12 x 18 size! And it has reference to the Tempe City Code. You know, the one that says the sign has to be posted at a minimum height of five feet…

Yeah, this one is posted 25 inches above the ground. Last time I checked, 25 inches is less than half of five feet. So we’ve got yet another failure per the Tempe City code. (not to mention this sign posted two feet off the ground is 160+ feet away from the main entrance. Maybe it’s just me, but I also don’t see this quite being “readable” at 50 feet.

What about the other tow warning sign?

It’s posted at the northeast corner from the entrance, and is edge-on to the entrance. In other words, when you drive into the lot, you see the edge of the sign (it’s about a quarter of an inch thick) from 160 feet away.

Here’s a shot taken from the southwest corner of the lot. It’s the closest I could get to capturing the entire lot without standing in the middle of Mill avenue at 5:30 in the afternoon.

In summary

We’ve got a “primary” tow warning sign (I call it primary as it is by far the closest to the entrance and was repeatedly referred to by both the tow truck drivers and the Tempe Police as a reference) that is: 1) 66% too small; 2) mounted too low; 3) doesn’t contain all required verbiage; 4) not visible from the entrance; and 5) not readable from 50 feet.

You’ve got one sign that meets size and verbiage code but is posted at less than half the required minimum height.

And you’ve got one sign of proper size, verbiage and posting height. In the back corner of the lot and presented edge on to the entrance approximately 160 feet from the entrance.

And this, according to both the Tempe Police on-scene that evening and a City of Tempe official, are following city code in placement, quantity and location.

Again, I’m no attorney. I’d love to get an attorney’s thoughts on this – realizing of course you can’t give “legal advice” in this format.  Given that Tempe City Code Section 32-6 (c) states, “No private towing carrier shall tow a vehicle from a private parking area unless the signs are posted as required by this section and conform with subsections (a), (b) and (e)” my next research step is looking into small claims court.

Larger photos are available on my Flickr account.

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Scam Alert: Tempe-Mill, LLC and Monster Impound & Recovery. Park your car at 7th St & Mill, get a $140 towing fee

Real Estate and Life: It’s all Puppies and Bunnies

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After a GREAT night at Ignite Phoenix #4, many participants went to La Bocca for some after hours networking.

Several of us parked in a vacant lot at the southeast corner of 7th & Mill, only to walk out to find our cars had been towed.

Here’s the [sarcasm on] big giant warning sign [sarcasm off] that parking there will result in towing.

Yep, it’s stuck on the back of an electrical box at the far end of the vacant lot at 701 S. Mill Street in Tempe (southeast corner of Mill & 7th St).

The lot is owned by “Tempe Mill LLC”, deeded on Nov 7, 1996 (per the Maricopa County Assessors public site).

According to the Nevada Secretary of State public site, Tempe Mill LLC is a Limited Liability Company registered in Nevada to a Dean Y. Kajioka, Esq. (source).

When I parked there, there were 5 or 6 other cars parked along the northern edge of the lot. Several cabs were also there, idling with the drivers in their cabs – I assume waiting for fares.

When I left La Bocca and got to the corner, a tow truck from Monster Impound & Recovery was in the process of towing a car (that I later found belonged to Steve Belt – who gets photo credits too) and one other car was parked next to Steve’s. Every other car was gone – hauled away by Monster Impound & Recovery.

There were several people milling about. One guy said one of the tow truck drivers has sprayed mace or pepper spray on him when he attempted to take a picture of the tow truck. He called the Tempe Police, who arrived very quickly.

More people whose cars had been towed began to arrive. A very nice family visiting from Mississippi also had there car towed. They had two small children with them and asked (quite politely I might add) if there was any way they could recover their car seats.

The tow truck drivers, two of the rudest and cockiest people I’ve encountered in a long time, told them the impound lot didn’t open until 9:00am (though the teeny tiny sign clearly says vehicles will be released at 8:00am).

The taxpayers in Tempe now get to pay for some police-arranged service to come pick up this family and get them some car seats.

The smart-ass tow truck driver told me, “Try suing us. People have been trying to for eight years”.

I called the number listed on the sign to try to recover my car tonight and was treated to one of the nastiest, rudest “ladies” I’ve ever encountered. She wouldn’t give me the impound lot address, and would only say I could call back at 9:00am tomorrow for information.

Here’s what REALLY chaps me…

Guess who the last car left in the lot belonged to?  I can’t say for sure who owned the car, but I can state unequivocally that one of the tow truck drivers unlocked the drivers door, got in, started the car and drove off.

So Monster apparently parks a car in the lot, baiting people to park there, then hauls them away. All for a tidy $140 fee (so I’m told. Guess I’ll find out for sure tomorrow. Update: cost was $135. Cash only, which I didn’t have. They gave me two weeks to pay noting at that point it would be turned over to collections where the fees would “at least triple” this amount).

One car owner told me he’d been parked there less than 30 minutes when his car was towed.

I asked one of the Tempe Police officers if this, “happens every night” and his response was, “Yeah, pretty much.”  They also said there was nothing they could do as this was private property and was “properly marked”.

Tempe City Code section 32-6 “Notice to public of right to tow” states:

(a) The owner or person in possession of any private parking area shall be deemed to have given consent to unrestricted parking by the general public in such parking area unless such parking area is posted with signs as prescribed by this section which are clearly visible and readable from a distance of fifty (50) feet away and at all points of entry.

(b) Signs will be a minimum of twelve (12) inches by eighteen (18) inches in size and will be mounted at a minimum height of five (5) feet and a maximum height of ten (10) feet above the ground.

I haven’t measured the sign (yet) but something tells me it’s going to be 12 x 18 inches and mounted five feet high. “Clearly visible and readable from a distance of fifty feet away” is highly suspect. I didn’t see the sign until the cocky tow truck driver pointed it out. Apparently none of the other seven people towed (nor their passengers) did either.

So maybe it’s “legal”. I don’t know, I’m not a lawyer like the guy that managers the LLC that owns the vacant lot. If they didn’t want people parking there, it would be an insignificant cost to post far more obvious signage, or here’s an idea – string a chain across the entry to the lot.

But wait, if you did that the towing company wouldn’t be able to park a car there. And you wouldn’t be able to charge people $140 a pop to retrieve their vehicles.

And all this after the Mayor of Tempe, Hugh Hallman, gives an impassioned plea at the opening of Ignite Phoenix to change the name to Ignite Tempe.

Whatever.

UPDATE: Interesting. Tempe Changes Rules on Towing to Prevent Companies From Scamming Drivers. So towing scams around Mill Ave are a known issue to the Tempe City Council…

Others Opine:
Roger Williams (@halfacat), another victim - Scam Alert! Towing Scam in Tempe, AZ

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I got this in a fortune cookie today.

Blogger humor resulted in me thinking it was hilarious, and I laughed out loud right there in the middle of the Chinese buffet.

People looked at me like I’d lost my mind.

For whatever reason this got me to wondering just how they get these things inside the cookie.

Fortunately, Google and the Library of Congress came to the rescue with this great article, “How do fortunes get inside of fortune cookies?”

You can’t tell me you knew that the Kitamura FCM-8006W fortune cookie making machine can produce 8,000 fortune cookies an hour.

See what you can learn here?

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Sunday Morning Funnies

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Caller: Yeah, I need some information on your listing at 123 Main Street.

Me: We don’t have a listing at 123 Main Street.

Caller: Sure you do, I’m looking at a print out from your web site.

Me: Our site shows ALL the homes listed for sale in the Phoenix area, not just our listings.

Caller: Really? Uhm, well, can you tell me the lockbox code for 123 Main Street?

[OK, home buyers and sellers don’t call asking for lockbox codes. I know the answer to this next question…]

Me: Are you working with an agent?

Caller: I am an agent. I’m with a client and he gave me this printout from your web site. And it doesn’t have the lockbox code.

Me: You’re an agent? Lockbox codes aren’t shown on public listings, for obvious reasons. Did you look up the listing in the MLS?

Caller: Uhm no, I just have the printout from my client. We’re in front of the property trying to get in.

[About this time I’m thinking, “Wow, you are an idiot”. But wait….]

Me: Well, is there a for sale sign at the property?

Caller: Yeah, it says it’s listed by John Doe at (insert brokerage name here).

Me: Well, I’m not John Doe, and I’m not with (insert brokerage name here).

Caller: Oh. Well why is this listing on your web site?

Me:  We have an IDX on our web site. It has all the listings on it. See at the bottom of the printout where it says, “Listing provided courtesy of (insert brokerage name here)?

Caller: An ID what? I really just need the lockbox code.

Me: You’ll need to call the listing agent, or look it up in the MLS.

Caller: Can you give me the listing agents number?

Me: It’s on the for sale sign.

Caller: Oh. Yeah. OK, I’ll call him.

Nine times out of ten, the phone will ring about 30 seconds later. That call typically follows this pattern.

Caller: Hey, I just called you. And uhm, the guy on the sign didn’t answer the phone. So I was wondering if you could look up the lockbox code for me?

[About this time I’m thinking, “Why do you expect me to do your job for you?” and more importantly, “I wonder what your client sitting in the front seat of your car is thinking right about now?”]

Me: I really don’t have time to look up a listing for you in the MLS. You should have done that before you went out showing homes.

Caller: Well, I had this printout, so I thought we were good.

Me: But the printout is from my site, not the MLS. It doesn’t have showing instructions, or the listing agents phone number, or whether the home is occupied, or if you need an appointment to show, or if there is an activated alarm, or maybe pet instructions. You know, that sort of thing.

Caller: Oh. Uhm, I really just need the lockbox code.

Me: You’ll have to call the listing agent, or look it up in the MLS.

Caller: But I’m in front of the house, and the listing agent isn’t calling me back.

Me: Well, I suggest you move on to the next home.

Caller: But all I’ve got on that is a printout from your site…

—–

Seriously folks, I’m not making this up. We get calls like this all the time. It’s mind-boggling. It ranks right up there with the people that come to our site to search for homes and in the box that says, “How you found us:” they put “my agent sent me here”.

I don’t get it.

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Can I see more photos please?

Listing Photo of the Week!

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Before:

After:

Why?

I dunno. Why not? The old site had been around four plus years, and was just… getting old.

I was running the site on the Point 2 Agent platform, which I still think is one of the better real estate template site providers out there. I’ve met many of the people at Point2 and respect them professionally, and consider several of them friends. Through no fault of theirs, I’d let the site fall into disarray, and it needed a facelift.

Obviously I went with the Wordpress platform for the latest incarnation. There is still much work to be done, but the bulk of the pages I wanted to keep are there, the 301 redirects are in place where needed and now we sit back and see what happens.

Listing Syndication

One of the things that keep me with the older system was the excellent listing syndication that Point2 provides. For those that don’t know, listing syndication is (basically) putting your real estate listings out on other sites. You can manually enter them site by site – just remove all sharp objects from the room before you go that route. A syndication system lets you enter them once and it propagates the information out across the far reaches of the world wide web.

I’ll spare you the pro and con arguments of third party listing aggregators in this post, but suffice it to say that with most of the planet looking for homes on the Internet, it seems prudent to get our listings on as many sites as possible.

Point2 did that very well. (Albeit it was quite tiresome to enter listings into the Multiple Listing System (MLS) and then re-enter them into the Point2 back end).

Enter ListHub. They pull listing data directly from the MLS and syndicate them to 30 different property sites. Cost? Free. (Unless you want reporting – and you probably should – but it’s not all that expensive).

Benefits of Wordpress

For me, I know Wordpress fairly well and can make it do pretty much what I want. Your mileage may vary. But using it over a template provider gives me complete control, and if you know me, you know I’m a control freak.

There also appears to be a significant performance improvement. Here are load times taken before and after the switchover (courtesy of Pingdom):

Before:	After:

Templated sites contain a lot of “overhead” to allow for ease of editing. Wordpress is pretty lean and mean. (Plus, I left a lot of stuff in the gutter of the Information Highway.)

So, was it painful?

It was excruciating. There is no easy way to switch over files from a provider where I have no server access. We’re talking good old-fashioned cut and paste. And stripping out a lot of formatting code. And reformatting. And placing 301 redirects. And uploading photos and files and whatnot to the new server. Then there is all that DNS and email MX record propagation jazz to consider as well.

Yeah, it pretty much sucked.

What’s next?

I fully expect to get slammed in Google and see a drop in traffic. I dropped out a lot of content that was stale, but it was still content and would land long-tailish searches. Fortunately, I rely more on this very blog you are reading (assuming you’ve stuck with me so far) for prospecting than on the traditional site, but it still did quite well. I think suspect hope that over time the traffic will return. And I think over time that the Wordpress platform (and the amazing Thesis theme) will ultimately do better in the search engines. If nothing else, it’s easier to add new content on this platform, and between Thesis, Wordpress and the nature of a blogging platform all bodes well for the SEO future of ThompsonsRealty.com.

Only time will tell I suppose.

I’d love to hear any thoughts, suggestions, or criticisms. If you are industrious / curious / bored you can still see the original site at JayAndFrancy.com, and of course the makeover at ThompsonsRealty.com.

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It’s not all about the money my a$$, rents are up and dumb agents fall for silly scam…

This video is worth the eight minutes.

There are some interesting comments on the TED blog post about this, with some proclaiming it’s Big Brotherish, some saying it will never work, and others asking what is the point.

The point is, technology is advancing at an inconceivable pace. The amount of data already out there is staggering, and accessing that data is getting easier by the day.  If you don’t think information and access to that information is life changing, you may want to step out from under your rock.

One commenter claimed “high speed internet isn’t fast enough for something like this”.

What, you think that isn’t going to change in the next 1, 5, 10, 20 years? Heck, the Internet as we know it didn’t even exist 20 years ago. In the mid 80s, I fired up a 4.77 megahertz PC with 640K of memory and a 10 meg hard drive and logged onto Compuserve with a 300 baud dial up modem. I can read faster than 300 baud can deliver text. In high school, we used an acoustic coupler to connect a terminal to a mainframe and stored stuff on punched tape. In my freshman year in college I wrote simple programs in FORTRAN and carried around a box of punch cards. (I still remember dropping that box full of cards and watching my program blow down Guadalupe Street in Austin. Where the hell were thumb drives then? Or even floppy disks?)

OK, so maybe at 48 years old, I’m a fossil.

Fossilized or not, I can see that technology is changing the world as we know if. If you have kids, watch how they use and interact with PCs, gaming consoles, and the like. Think about what they know at their age compared to what you knew at the same age. Think about what a device like MITs Sixth Sense could do.

It’s mind boggling.

Hat tip to Dru Bloomfield! (via Fred LaBell, President President Phoenix Association of REALTORS®)

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The TPREG Forum: Blogsperiment #7,943a

Cool Site of the Week: CenPho.TV

Today I added a 23 inch Samsung flat screen to the collection:

Trust me, once you go dual monitors, you’ll never go back!

Thanks Francy, for putting up with my incessant whining, and an extra special thanks to our accountant Greg Brantley of Brantley Accounting and Taxes. His wizardry with a 1040 and Schedule C provided some unexpected funds.

If two monitors is cool, why not eight?

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Inside the Manhattan Googleplex

My friend Sarah Cooper, of the wonderful West Virginia real estate blog The Putnam Scoop (and also of Real Estate Shows fame), exhibits some remarkable fashion sense doesn’t she?

The first thing you probably notice in the photo above — once you get past Sarah’s charming smile — are the very hip fuzzy blue arm warmers. Apparently it’s pretty cold in West Virginia this time of year:

Contrast this to the current weather in Phoenix:

Well, about all I can say with regard to the weather difference is that it may be time to consider buying a Phoenix home… Just sayin’…

Now the astute observer of this photo may also notice that Sarah is also sporting a fabulous new t-shirt. But that’s really neither here-nor-there.

I know people are just clamoring for a shirt like Sarah’s. If you really can’t live without one, you can order it in a variety of styles on Zazzle. Buy from Zazzle and I get a miniscule kickback which I will donate to the American Cancer Society. I’ll also give one away at Inman Connect in NYC in January. Just be the first person to ask me for it (in person), after I speak, at Bloggers Connect and you’ll be the proud owner of an XL Phoenix Real Estate Guy t-shirt. Jeepers, as if hearing speakers like Gary Vaynerchuck, Craig Newmark, Robert Shiller, and Andrew Ross Sorkin (and more) aren’t good enough reasons to attend, how’s a free TPREG t-shirt for an incentive!

If I thought anyone would respond, I’d set up a “comment contest” on the blog for a freebie like I did for the Seth Godin Tribes giveaway. But I suspect many more people want Seth’s book than would want a silly self-promoting t-shirt. Now if Inman were to supply an all-conference pass for Connect that I could give away, we’d have a real contest on our hands… (hint hint Inman friends)

Thanks Sarah, for being a great sport and for spreading the Phoenix Real Estate Guy love!

.
Photo Credit: SarahWV on Flickr. Used with permission, of course!

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