The Subprime Primer

I just discovered a wickedly funny little power point presentation over at the Inman Blog, in which foul-mouthed little stick figures explain the sub-prime debacle. And when I say foul-mouthed, I mean foul-mouthed. If you don't like bad words, please don't click through it.

F-bombs, stick figures, and humor aside, the "Primer" does a great job of putting the whole mortgage mess into fairly simple terms. Apparently this was circulated among Wall Street traders earlier this year, though I'm not sure of the original source.

Property Marketing, East Tennessee Style

All you non-Realtor types out there probably don't know about MLS E-Flyers. The concept is simple: instead of sending out 100s of paper flyers to agents all over Knoxville to market new listings or price reductions, you pay some money to an online service like MLSflyers.com, make an E-flyer and send it out to every member of the Knoxville Area Association of Realtors. Yes, it's kind of spam, but a) it only spams Realtors, b) it sells houses and c) it saves trees, so we deal with it.

So, one of my first tasks of the day is to click through these flyers that have accumulated in my inbox overnight. Usually they are pretty standard. Occasionally they here unintentionally hilarious. Here is a headline from an E-Flyer I opened up this morning:

SELLER WILL GIVE BUYER A $1000 WALMART GIFTCARD AND ONE YEAR SATELLITE TV!!!

Not mentioned in the flyer, but perhaps easy enough to guess is that this "home" is also very portable:

Monday Link Round-Up - Weather Update Edition

Today's weather:




Partly cloudy with a slight chance of HELOC freeze ... - Calculated Risk

and the National Weather service has issued a basement tornado advisory. - The Onion

In other news -

The Second Creek Greenway is coming! - Knoxviews.com