John Sieling's (jsieling) Blog

Listening right now to one of my favorite baseball analysts, Mike Krukow.  He pitched for our SF Giants, did himself proud, played around the league and settled into the broadcast chair some time back. I remember him saying about "elimination games" that the team on the bubble should just "win to...

Just a thought on blogging and social networking.  In much the same way we fight the negative perceptions of our ranks in the real world, the same applies in the online world.  Posting of random tidbits of non-real estate information is like electronic junk mail and does zero to further your bran...

Recently the City of Belmont California, located about mid-way between SF and San Jose, enacted an onerous and useless open house sign ordinance.  Basically, it's a violation if the sign is on public property.  This apparently arose from a non-Realtor commercial sign that appeared in a public par...

The SF Peninsula real estate market is always a bit of an anomoly when compared to the rest of the nation.  That's not to mention the differences from SF, the East Bay, Marin, the coast and on and on. With the triple play of cheap mortgage money, limited inventory and a strong local technology ec...

Before i get too deep, let's be clear that I am not an engineer.  But I know a couple good ones and trust their opinions, which are just that, opinions.  And those opinions can be highly divergent.  I've found the best engineer partner I can work with gives unvarnished, easy to understand advise ...

For four years I was on the Wells Fargo Premiere Asset Services roster of listing agents.  My good fortune and hard work gave me listings from Concord to SF to Alamo to Redwood City to La Honda to San Jose.  It was a blast and I'd be happy to do it again (for the right reasons).  Every listing so...

Discussions about politics and our democracy are pretty easy things to get worked up about.  But the fact is, we need a functioning democracy to organize ourselves for the greater good or it all becomes a Hobbesian war off narcissism.  Just want to mention this during a highly contentious Preside...

Hey everybody, have you heard the news? Gonna work this Sunday, I got the open house blues!   It's raining outside, the road is closed Ain't seen nobody since I came up the road My ad didn't make the paper, got zero pageviews Sadly I admit I got the open house blues   Yes, the open houes blues I ...

As this very unique market moves through it's place in history, there's two items I'd like to flag up for us to at least acknowledge and then consider for change.  Whether you are the cause of such hypocritical behavior or the victim of same, please read on. We realtors have a real image problem ...

...on our way back to a "normal" market.  The sub-prime/Alt-A mess is going to take awhile to process through, what do we think is the horizon for getting the public mind-set off this issue?  When will the Fed and Finance industry, either collaboratively or separately, take the final actions they...