View from the Mountain

The Best Burger in Roanoke

For a while I was irritated by the Hardee's commercial that claimed that Roanoke had chosen Hardee's Thickburger as the best burger in Roanoke.  Recently I noticed that City Magazine did a vote on the best burger  in Roanoke and that Five Guys won.

The problem with these magazine eatery votes is similar to the problem we face with our political system.  We have far too many uninformed people voting.  The result being that the country ends up in a mess and the wrong burger gets anointed "King of the Burgers."

I have enjoyed a number of Five Guys Burgers, they're very good.  I've even had a few burgers from Hardee's and a number of other restaurants around the area including Red Robin, Fuddruckers, and Ruby Tuesdays.  I also ran an Angus cattle ranch for over ten years. A few pounds of high quality burger might have slipped onto to my plate from the grill during that time.

With that background, I challenge anyone to find better tasting burgers than the ones that come from Burger in the Square. 

You have to really want to get one.  They're in the old Market Building which means going downtown and finding a parking spot.  It's probably not as convenient as the other spots, but the burger you will find is well worth the effort.

It is the best burger in town.  It's not even really a contest.  My wife and I ate there today, she had a single combo, I had a double combo.  The total damage (not to the arteries) but to the wallet was $12.00.  You won't find better burger meat in Roanoke.  Their phone number is (540) 982-1639.

Sunshine, Cow tipping, & Macaca

We're starting to see our first serious stretch of sunshine after nearly eleven inches of rain up here on the mountain.  I woke to find an article, "Cow tipping? Probably bull," in today's Roanoke Times. The story  pulled me into another time and place.

It brought back memories of my first up close and personal experiences with cows.  I  had just bought our first few head of cattle from the guy who sold me one of our farms.  Cows being what they are, they immediately broke through some fences and got mixed up with the neighbor's dairy cattle.  Our first chore was to separate the two herds.  I should have stopped right there and given the cows to the local dairy farmer, but I didn't.  We eventually got rid of those cows and enjoyed a relatively cowless time in Nova Scotia.

As today's (09-06-06)  Shoe cartoon indicates, I don't think my memory was very good even then.  My wife, Glenda and I moved to New Brunswick. We ended up with nearly two hundred head of cattle.  Most years we saw between 60 and 70 calves born.  I was there for many of the births.  We actually ran that farm for nearly ten years until we dispersed our cattle herd in the fall of 1981.

I shoved more cattle through handling chutes than I care to remember.  I once had a bull that stalked me for a couple of months until I tricked him onto a truck headed for the slaughter house.  We had mostly purebred Angus cattle, but over the years we had experience with Charolais, Herefords, and even a Guernsey which I milked for several years.

Anyone that tells you he's done cow tipping is full of bull.  First off, no cow that I've ever met would let you sneak up on them.  Secondly most that I've seen would either run or run after you if you tried to hit them anywhere.  The cow tipping reminds me of the tractor tipping in Cars, the movie, which I wrote about in my post, "Cars- A great movie."  Tractors are pretty darn stable unless you drive them on a hillside where most SUVs would have already turned over.

While cow tipping is a pretty easy mystery to clear up, I've been looking for some more explanation on the  George Allen "Macaca" incident.  I was born in North Carolina and have spent much of my life wandering the south from Tennessee to Virginia.  I've never heard the term "Macaca" until the news reports of this event so I was a little mystified.  Of course I don't travel in the circle of those who keep a hangman's noose on display.

Last night I read an article, "George Allen's 'macaca moment’" in the The Week Magazine.  It offered up a pretty good explanation.

“Macaca,” derived from macaque, a genus of monkey, is a racial slur used in France against foreigners with dark skin. Allen—who has a French Tunisian mother and speaks French fluently...

Naturally the French are to blame.  :)

The rest of the article went on to highlight some interesting points about Allen.

The irony here, said Michael Scherer in Salon.com, is that the man Allen insulted is a native-born Virginian of Asian Indian heritage, whereas Allen, the son of legendary NFL coach George Allen, grew up wealthy in California. Since then, however, he’s been wearing cowboy boots, chewing tobacco, and wooing the Republican Party’s right wing as a “down-home” champion of the “‘real America,’ the one without homosexuals, movie moguls, or Ivy League professors who want to ban guns and burn flags.” Hey, it worked for George W. Bush, said Mike Allen in The Washington Post.

Well with this news "Florida's Katherine Harris won the Republican primary despite dismal poll numbers, a subpoena in a bribery investigation and droves of campaign deserters,"  I think it might be time to stop reading the news for a while.

 

Covenant Presbyterian Groundbreaking

This past Sunday, September 3, was an important day for Covenant Presbyterian Church where we've been members for a number of years. 

Once again it was time for Covenant to grow. This time some classrooms are being added, the  narthex is going to be larger in size, and some other accommodations are being made so the church is much more accessible.

This is the second time since we've been members of Covenant that the church has expanded.  It's a tremendous group effort to grow while continuing to fund the many wonderful things that Covenant Presbyterian sponsors.

Rev. Robert A. Fiedler, who is co-pastor with Rev. Dusty Kenyon Fiedler, asked me to take a few snapshots of the groundbreaking event.  The pictures I took of the event are at this link.  Click on any individual picture to start the slide show.  Since there are a number of young shovel handlers that I don't know, I haven't added names to the pictures yet, but hopefully I will get to that.

There were some celebrities at the event. Three founding members of Covenant who were involved in the first meetings of our church forty-nine years ago joined us and helped start the digging for the newest expansion.

It was a very auspicious beginning to Covenant Presbyterian's latest efforts to meet the needs of their growing congregation.

Who Killed the Electric Car?

My wife, Glenda, is one of those lucky ladies who can always count on an exciting Saturday night.  This past one, in spite of her better judgment, she joined me for "Who Killed the Electric Car," at the Grandin Theater.

In a stroke of pure luck, we were the only ones there to see the 9:25 pm showing so we got a private viewing after I wandered downstairs to remind them to turn on the film.

Actually all joking aside, you really should see this film.  The duplicity uncovered by this film is amazing.  The oil companies, the California government, the car companies, and our oil drenched federal government all share in the blame for the death of the electric car.  We're fortunate that there is a good chance of a re-birth.

It's really hard for me to believe that we would have a government so opposed to energy conservation that President would actually join a lawsuit to kill the California regulation that spawned the electric car.

General Motors and other companies actually started producing electric cars in 1996 in order to meet the requirement of a new California regulation that required the companies to have a certain percentage of zero emissions car on the road in California if they wanted to continue selling car in California.

Much to General Motors' credit they produced a very well designed, speedy, and highly acceptable consumer electric car.  They leased them to a few people, and people absolutely loved them in spite of their limited range (around 120 miles).  They had almost zero repairs and California even went to the trouble of creating the infrastructure so you could charge them while at work.

Then a strange thing happened.  It was almost as if the car companies and our governments decided that the electric cars were a virus that needed to be erased from the face of the earth.  The car companies joined by the US government sued California to change the regulation.  The chairman of the board of the organization charged with making and enforcing the laws managed to get a sugar plum job in a fuel cell research group.  The next thing you know California has bought off on the idea that fuel cells are an answer to our oil addiction.  Of course the electric car was already on the road and working, and according to the movie we need five miracles or so before fuel cell cars get here in the next twenty years.

The electric cars, which were all leased, were removed from the roads and crushed in spite of people begging to be able to buy them.

Now the President is touting ethanol.  Anything to keep fuel flowing through the oil commpanies.  This is a sobering movie which shows just how far our government has sunk and how tied up it is with big business and big oil.  After seeing General Motors' behavior in this movie, it's hard to consider ever buying another General Motor vehicle.  There are two sides to every story so if you want to read GM's response, you can read it at  "GM'S FORWARD PROGRESS: FACTS VERSUS FICTION."

The only good thing to come out of the electric car experiment was that Toyota was so afraid of some of the hybrid technology that was being developed in the US that they launched a crash program which has given us the Prius.

General Motors which had access to the hybrid technology but has seemingly ignored it until recently. A comment attributed to GM was that Toyota would go broke trying to sell hybrids.  That doesn't appear to be the case.

There is some even better news.  People are creating modified models of the Toyota Prius that have enhanced batteries which can be charged overnight and which allow for extended electric motor only use.  These modified cars are called "plug-in hybrids."

I'm pretty excited about the potential of electric cars.  The movie confirmed that we can't expect the government to ever cure us of our oil addiction, we'll have to do it ourselves.

Having just seen "Who Killed the Electric Car?", I'm a little suspicious of the government.  You don't suppose that the lower gasoline prices we're seeing might have anything to do with an upcoming election where the oil men in power aren't being viewed in a particularly favorable light?

Old school at times and proud of it

The Internet is an absolutely wonderful tool.  I would guess that relatively few people use or know how to use the Internet much better than I do.  The availability of services and products that you can reach through the Internet is truly astounding.  Those services and products that I can get at the click of a button make my life easier.

Yet sometimes even I get absolutely sick of people trying to force the round Internet peg way of doing things into the square peg of what people need.  It's especially irritating when the transparency of their desire to get rich is so obvious.

The case in point would be a NY Times article forwarded to me by Stephen, a good friend who probably knew that the text would rattle my cage.  The article, "The Last Stand of the 6-Percenters?," talks a good deal about Redfin an on line real estate firm.  Refin's revolution is that it rebates a good chunk of traditional commissions back to its "customers."  The article goes on to talk about how the commission system in real estate doesn't benefit either sellers, buyers, or real estate agents.  And it talks about the wonderful benefits of using the Internet but how real estate agents control the information so that very little information is available on the Internet.

In fact the article has the following quote.

"You can find out more on the Internet about an eBay Beanie Baby than you can about a $1 million house," said Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, a licensed broker in Washington State and California.

That my friends is pure poppycock or the not so pure stuff you clean out of a bull's pen with a pitch fork.  I've just spent the last three summers looking for the right spot on the North Carolina coast.  I worked with real estate agents and used the Internet extensively.  The comment by Glenn Kelman is little more than self-serving marketing.  At my request I'm still getting announcements of new listings from the agent who eventually helped us find the right property.  I've gone to the effort of editing out, changing or erasing information so that the following glance into the MLS system is pretty generic.  I encourage you to click on this link and tell me how much more information, you would want.  You might want some of the stuff that I've erased like the location, directions, price, and legal description of the property.  You might want the days the property has been on the market, which is something our agent always made sure we knew about.

Then again maybe you want to click on the map button to see the lot size in relation to other lots or perhaps you would like to see the one in one hundred years flood zone or the wetlands.  Then there are the pictures or sometimes virtual tours which I sure anyone who has spent some time looking at real estate on line has seen.  Of course you can check Zillow.com to see if the tax value of the house is available.  Try entering your own house.  You should remember that tax value usually does NOT match market value. I guess they really document those Beanie Babies on eBay.

So if the real estate system is working so badly why aren't more people other than Mr. Kelman who stands to make a fortune screaming for change?  Well the likely answer is that people are pretty well satisfied with the current system which has a tremendous amount of flexibility.

If you don't like the current system, nothing stops you from putting up a for sale by owner sign and selling your own house. Perhaps you might want to ignore the statistics considering the source, but people who sell their own homes (FSBO) didn't do as well as those helped by agents according Realtor.com.

....the typical FSBO home sold for $198,200 compared to $230,000 for agent-assisted home sales.

There are plenty of organizations out there to help people sell their homes without a traditional broker.   My expectation is that if this worked really well, regular real estate agents would be out of business already.  As a buyer you're free to buy one of those houses or go knocking on doors and try to buy whatever house strikes your fancy.  If you're a "For Sale By Owner" and want to put up information about your house, go to it if you know how and have access to a web site.  May your site get all the traffic you know how to bring to it.

Now perhaps I have a little twisted view of the situation since I spent three summers looking for a beach house and eventually got so I enjoyed real estate so much that I'm now on the road to becoming a real estate broker in North Carolina some time in the future, assuming I can pass another test and meet my continuing education requirements.  I also found our house with the expert help of a human real estate agent willing to pound the pavement with us and for us.  All my Internet experience wasn't the key to success.  A great traditional real estate agent with local experience was how we ended up being successful.

Yet part of the reason I'm headed to a future as a real estate broker myself is that after the three long summers, I really see the benefits that an outstanding agent can bring to the table. There's a true value proposition in the relationship between agent and client.  In these days of  humans being replaced by machines or Internet sites, that's rare, and I would like to be part of it for as long as it lasts.   You get to help people find their dreams, and actually that's a lot of fun.  It's a satisfying job. I can see myself applying that same dedication that we got from our agent to the needs of  my clients.  There will be plenty of frustrations, but I don't know of a job that is without those unless maybe writing less than correct articles for the NY Times is.  :)

It's interesting to note that in the Times article, a Mr. Wolf, who used Redfin, refers to himself and others as "customers."  That is significant since anyone who has just come out of a real estate pre-licensing course will tell you there is a huge difference between clients and customers.  Actually real estate agents are required by law to explain this difference to you.  Then you get to pick whether you want to be a client or a customer.

There are real estate agents who focus on listing houses.  Their clients are the sellers and the real estate agents have a fiduciary responsibility to them to get the best possible prices for their houses.  These listing agents have a signed a contract to deliver a "ready, willing, and able" buyer to the seller.  At the point the seller  has received a signed offer meeting the conditions he or she set out in their listing, they can still choose to not sell his or her house, but the seller will likely still owe a commission to his real estate agent who did the job specified in their contract with the seller.   Most listings I've been told specify how much the listing agent is willing to pay another agent who delivers a buyer.  How a buyer's agent gets paid seems negotiable.

So I wonder why an agent wouldn't want a buyer for their clients house?  My guess is that Redfin is trying to strong arm the agents into taking less than what is specified in the contract they have already signed with the sellers. I have heard that MLS systems are very localized so I'm sure you can find ones that might be tough to partner with from the perspective of Redfin, but you can also just go to the next county if you're having challenges.  It is against the law to regulate commissions or to try to standardize them.  If you and a real estate broker can't agree on a commission structure, try another one.  No one says or can say you have to pay six per cent.

I'm pretty sure the system we have today is flexible enough to meet the varied needs of all sorts of buyers and sellers.  If Redfin's model is the one model of the future, I would be very surprised.  I own Amazon.com stock, but I don't buy every book from Amazon.  I still value local book sellers.  I've bought cars over the Internet, but the last two I bought through local car dealerships.  The test drive and service were important to me on those two vehicles.

If this is really the "Last Stand of the Six Percenters" as Damon Darlin's article in the NY Times would have us believe, then people should at least know that agents working for a company end up splitting their commissions with their companies. Unless the agent has no company behind him or her, it is unlikely that they are getting a full six percent.  They aren't getting nearly as much money off a single sale as some would have you believe.  Also the marketing costs of selling a listing are born by the agent.

If the agents disappear, then the buyers should remember "Caveat emptor," because there will no longer be agents around who are required by law to disclose material defects.  The sellers' requirements actually vary depending on state.

Then after these buyers have bought their house for less, perhaps they will also enjoy selling it for less.  It's interesting that of the last three houses we've bought, all three have been in the neighborhoods where our real estate agents lived or were going to build houses. 

Darlin's article makes a big deal out of the average real estate agent only making  $49,300.  It's pretty hard to make an argument using $49,300 that real estate agents are pillaging either buyers or sellers. I don't exactly see how commissions as low as Redfin's helps the real estate agents.  Even with the current weakening of the market in some states, it's also hard to convince me that the current system hasn't brought great benefits to most homeowners.

As to the small average income, just maybe not everyone wants to make a pile of money.  Perhaps the author neglects to understand the other benefits of the job, such as being an independent contractor largely able to succeed or fail through their own efforts or scheduling of their own time.  Maybe there could be other things that motivate good agents like helping people find their dream spots or sharing their dream neighborhoods with others.  There are lots of other professions where the average is under $49,300 per year.  A number of real estate agents I've talked to agree that they're willing to trade money for control over their own jobs.  Finding a job that lets you do that is also a rarity in today's workplace.

My suggestion is that if you've been living in an area for ages, you might well be able to buy your own home with very little professional help, but if you sign up to a buyer's agent agreement with a good agent, you are likely to get yourself a better deal with a lot less work.  If you're selling your home, the numbers suggest that you'll do better with a seller's agent, but if you want to do it yourself, there are lots of way to accomplish that.

If you're going into a new area and think you can buy the best house for your needs without the help of some local expertise, I wish you luck.  Just maybe you haven't bought as many properties as I have.  As I think back on the ones that I bought through real estate agents and the ones that I didn't, it's pretty clear to me that I got a better deal on the ones that I bought with the help of agents.  I have no question we've done better selling with the help of agents.

The cool thing is that with selling and buying real estate, no one is forcing you to do it one way or the other.  The idea that information on the Internet is restricted by real estate agents so that a poor struggling Internet company can't provide information to its customers is just another Internet get rich quick scheme, if you don't believe me try searching a few MLS systems yourself.  You'll be stunned by all the information there.

If you're a serious buyer, pre-qualified for a mortgage, and not someone just playing "let's go look at houses" on Sunday afternoon, make sure you call me when you find a listing agent who won't take you to see one of  his or her listings because I need a photo of that idiot.

Just as I choose to not always shop at SAMs' Club or to not always buy things over the Internet, so will I always choose to be situational when buying or even selling something big like a house or a car. As someone I respect says regularly, what I do "depends" on the situation.  I read the local paper in hard copy and subscribe on line to the New York Times.  I asked my wife which is the easiest to do, buy clothes through LL Bean's on line catalogue or call them by telephone with a paper catalogue by your side?  She quickly replied, a phone and a paper catalogue.  I would agree.

Use the Internet, just realize that people can still be of tremendous value in the real estate equation.  Sometimes local knowledge can't be shoehorned into a computer.   Some things are perhaps better bought straight from the web.  Yet the Internet can be a square peg in some round holes, and once in a while the real goal of an Internet based business isn't so much doing something better, but actually figuring out how to get themselves rich faster without perhaps providing you with all the services you might end up wanting or needing.

There aren't many free lunches out there, and you rarely get more than you pay for even on the Internet.