… is underway at the Bloodhound. Thanks as always to those who nominated three (!) posts from the past week. One made the short list, which always is a good thing. Especially when rant seemed to be the order of the week.

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Here’s the list of today’s Phoenix real estate open houses as listed in the Arizona Regional MLS. All data is deemed reliable but is not guaranteed.

I opted to put the list in the PDF format today, mostly due to time constraints (not kickoff of the NFL games in 40 minutes, but an offer that I need to present to one of my sellers.)

In the future, I can post the list either as table like yesterday or in the PDF. What seems to work best for you?

PHOENIX REAL ESTATE OPEN HOUSES IN ARMLS - SEPTEMBER 30 (pdf - 71K)

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In Arizona, the calendar turning from the end of September to the beginning of October means summer has broken once and for all. Triple-digit temperatures (of which we had a record number) give way to the kind of weather that makes the rest of the country jealous - 80-odd degrees, gentle breezes and sunshine.

This also is the time of year when many of us plant our winter lawns, rye grass laid on top of whatever happened to survive the summer - grass, dirt, tumbleweeds, small rodents.

Planting a lawn likely is a foreign concept to many, including my growing collection of Canadian readers, so I thought I’d share the basics.

1) Measure the lawn. You could do this by stepping off the length or width 0r, for better results, pulling out a tape measure. Or you could use the method passed down through at least two generations of Dalton males - stare at the lawn and say, “it’s about yea big.”

2) Go to the nursery. Summer Winds Nursery on Bell Road sells winter lawn packages - for one all-inclusive cost, you get a set amount of seed, seed cover and lawn starter. They even suggest how much seed you’ll need based on the square footage you seek to cover. Unfortunately, none of the packages seem to be made for a lawn that’s “yea big.”

3) Spread the lawn starter and the seed. Normally you would use a spreader for something like this, but that method fails once you’ve determined your children used both your push spreader and your handheld spreader as props in some elaborate game and that after the game’s conclusion, they left the parts to melt in the summer sun. Fortunately, the seed can be spread by hand though your skin soon will be green from the dye included on the seed.

4) Return to the nursery for more seed. While this happens most often when trying to convert “yea big” into something meaningful, it’s almost guaranteed that you will not have enough seed. Even if you bought four bags to cover two square feet, you’re going to run out of seed. The green dye actually is a magical ingredient that causes seed to disappear once you’ve reached into the bag or otherwise dispensed with some of the contents. But before you return to the nursery …

5) Begin laying down the seed cover. And what is seed cover? Compost. Fun stuff. Just rip open the bag and begin pouring. Don’t even THINK about leaving the seed uncovered lest your entire lawn soon be covered by pigeons migrating from across North America. But now that I think about it …

5a) Chase away the birds. What they don’t tell you is pigeons and other airborne foul can spot seed cover from 36 miles away. I’m almost certain the swallows wouldn’t return to Capistrano if a large amount of seed cover was left in Pacoima. Seed cover does manage to save about 8% of the seed spread, so at least you have that. (This was number six but the silly Wordpress software is inserting a smiley emoticon which clearly is not appropriate for a topic of such magnitude.)

7) Finish spreading the seed. See step 3. If you were smart, you would have purchased a spreader at the nursery. But you most likely were so busy cursing the demise of the first two and the fact you needed to buy more seed that you couldn’t focus on something so logical.

7a) Start watering. And watering. And watering. This also is the time that you discover that the sprinklers that handyman fixed back in August really aren’t working right. So you get to go back to your roots and start watering by hand. No spray nozzle needed … this is what your thumb is for! And don’t mind that fact you may water your cell phone at the same time. … Not that I did this. (See above emoticon note for the reason there’s no 8.)

9) Wait for the first blades to appear. And wait. And wait. It’s almost as much fun as watching Notre Dame’s offense. (Sorry, Dad.)

10) Once the first blade appears drag your children, wife and pets into the yard to see the event. Commence celebration akin to Tom Hanks in Castaway when he makes fire.

11) Get a picture … if frost hits, you’re done for.

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Borrowing a page from Cheryl Johnson’s Northeast LA Blog, NELA Live, below is a list of the open houses scheduled in the Phoenix real estate market for Saturday, September 29.

All information is provided by the brokers through the Arizona Regional MLS and is deemed reliable but not guaranteed.

(I’m working on a way to make the information more visually friendly but ARMLS doesn’t provide a download option, which means everything needs to be re-formatted by hand in Excel. Once I have it figured out, the maps will follow.)

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Those of you not in the real estate industry may read a post like this morning’s about Move.Com’s abortive purchase of Active Rain and wonder, “why should any of this matter to me?” Why should someone looking to buy or sell real estate in Phoenix or elsewhere care who owns what or writes what?

The reason is simple … as much as these third-party companies are trying to make a buck on the backs of real estate agents and brokers, they’re trying to do the same to the public as a whole. Maybe it’s somewhat less blatant but it’s there.

Several months ago, Active Rain added a Q&A section. Most of the questions I’ve seen there should have been directed at the asker’s agent, assuming they had one - in short, they were looking for real estate advice without cost. So be it.

If no one had utilized the Q&A section, however, it would cease to exist. And some of the perceived value of Active Rain would have disappeared.

The same can be said for Trulia Voices, which could be fixed if only the designers finally figured out agents are answering questions not to be helpful but to be able to point to their number of answers and where they rank.

/begin rant

Case in point … this morning someone asked about whether it’s the right time to buy real estate in Casa Grande, a city about one-third of the way between Phoenix and Tucson in Pinal County. The first two agents to answer were from California - one from Mountain View, the other from San Francisco. Aside from pointing to an Altos Research chart, as one of them did, they don’t know a thing about Casa Grande. Probably couldn’t find it on a map if you spotted them the county. But they feel they have sufficient expertise to answer a market-specific question about the area.

Yes, Mike Simonsen and Ed Monaghan, this means you. When I answer questions about your market despite my lack of credentials, feel free to call me out. Except it won’t happen because I don’t give a damn about where I rank in answers given.

/end rant

If no one was asking questions on Trulia Voices (aside from the agents asking questions to boost their count for that category) then that portion of the site would fail to exist.

Redfin’s been duping the public for just over a year, claiming to be the catalyst for the real estate revolution. Comment on a Redfin post and defenders storm to the fore, saying that Redfin is saving the day. Whatever. Redfin’s not doing anything that hasn’t been done in the past. They’re simply counting on the contempt for full service real estate agents and hoping no one pulls back the curtain.

(Except some people are … and the ending’s already being written, barring another round of venture capital.)

It’s almost to the point where as a member of the public, if you hear someone discussing the need for “transparency” in real estate, the need to revolutionize the industry, you’re better off running for the door. Because these groups don’t care what happens to you, the general consumer. They’re only interested in cashing in when someone buys them out.

Active Rain gets credit for generating leads for its agents because the SEO value is fairly strong. But 95% of what’s written there is for other agents, not the public. But they know, as do the rest of us, that high rankings on a search engines equals expertise in most folks’ mind. I was just the same, at least until I started learning SEO.

Neither Active Rain nor Move.Com nor Real Town Communities nor HouseHugg nor Trulia nor Zillow really cares about what happens to the consumer. They don’t have to deal with the public - not on (albeit electronic) face-to-face basis. We do. Real estate professionals, as maligned as we may be, do.

We explain why the Zestimate is off or why the advice you’re getting from agents in North Dakota on Trulia has no bearing on Arizona law. We try to rectify the bevy of errors that are written as fact in the blogs of some newbie whose sole interest in writing the post isn’t public education but rather lead conversion.

I don’t agree with half of what the bubble bloggers write but at least they strive for some form of honesty, aside from the fiasco that is Housing Panic. They’re trying to educate the public with their side of the story. But at least they have an opinion and passion.

Most of the real estate 2.0, transparency-trumpeting companies have neither. Because neither pays, to their mind. They view you as a lead, a piece of inventory to be converted to cash when Mother Google or some other larger company comes along to write the check.

And then they’ll be on the beach with an umbrella in their drink while the rest of us keep picking up the pieces and carrying the banner for what Real Estate 2.0 really ought to be - an effort to educate first and foremost, with possible business running a distant second.

In the interim, hell will freeze over before these groups profit on my intellectual property again. I’ll still list in Zillow because it’s what owners expect … but the blog posts, the heart and soul of my business, are mine. Not Active Rain’s. No one else’s.

(I better go … as soon as this posts, my mother will be calling to ask why I’m so bitter. It’s not bitterness, Mom. It’s the desire to do what’s right in the face of a growing number of folks who believe “right” is measured in the size of their check. And that’s just wrong.)

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