Today is Thursday July 28, 2016 and this is the 28th episode of the Marshall Report. Welcome to the podcast.
In this week’s podcast;
1. Books
2. Question of the week
3. Trusting the Pokemon
4. Currently for sale
5. Rising Damp
6. Reading blogs on RSS
7. Living globally
8. Yahoo
9. Real estate forum
10. Fish
Books
So I decided that I am going to read more books this summer. Reading is a nice quiet past time. It is good for the soul. Being a good reader makes you a better writer. So I thought I would download some books and read them on my iPad. I signed up for a Kindle unlimited and there are some books there that I want to read. But not a lot. So I started searching the titles of authors that I really like: Micheal Connelly, Stephen King, John Grisham…good trashy summertime novels. But I discovered that they are really expensive.
Why are they so expensive? All of the costs have for an digital version of a book have fallen to 10% of what they would be to print, ship and stock a book in the traditional way but downloading a book is the same price of buying one at Chapters, sometimes more.
I went to the library instead and borrowed some books.
Question of the week: What is it like being a real estate agent?
A question that I get asked from time to time is what is it like being an agent.
The answer: The great thing about being a real estate agent, I think, is that it forces you to become who you really are. With other jobs, say being a police officer or working for a large company, you as the individual must conform to the corporate culture or the structure of the organization. With real estate, your brokerage is essentially the place where you hang your license. The brokerage offers support and guidance and sometimes some training but really you as the agent are on your own.
Becoming a successful real estate agent for most people, including myself, is a process of learning that takes at least two years and maybe four or five. There is lots to know and you have to be good at a lot of things and great at a few too. Having said that, you will meet lots of different kinds of agents that have succeeded in lots of different kinds of ways.
Being a realtor is a very satisfying career. It is also sometimes frustrating, always time consuming, but rewarding both emotionally and financially. You have to love what you do and you have to do what you like. A lot of agents and sales trainers will tell you you have to do this and you have to do that — for example you have to do Open Houses and you have go out and knock on doors for two hours every day. But I don’t agree. If you want to succeed you have to put in the hours. But you have to find your own path. There are lots of ways to be successful in real estate.
Trusting the Pokemon
Last week I blogged about how the Pokemon Go phenomenon or to be more specific, the future augmented reality will affect real estate. If I was a programmer or engineer of some kind, I think I could put together the disruption that real estate needs to finally move into the 21st century.
I can envision it.
I know what the future looks like. I just don’t know how to get there from here.
Anyway, a little more on Pokemon Go. There is a gym in Waterloo Park. The other day when we were out walking the dog, we happened upon about 20, 25 people standing around, with their cellphones in hand. It is kind of weird. It is kind of like performance art.
There was a story in the newspaper that the Waterloo Regional police have received about 30 calls relating to Pokemon Go. In most cases, the callers are concerned by what they see as suspicious activity – people hanging around certain areas at unusual hours, or moving around oddly.
I think that is hilarious.
But we always distrust things we don’t understand, don’t we?
Current for sale statistics
At this time of year, just like at Christmastime, listings go through a bit of a trough. On average we have about 1200 homes for sale on our local MLS. In the springtime that sometimes swells to near 2000.
How many homes are on the market now?
There are currently 813 homes for sale in Kitchener Waterloo through our local MLS.
That is low.
Of those, 813 homes for sale, 375 are single detached freehold houses. 370 are condos. That is almost an equal split. The rest are townhouse, duplexes and other types of housing.
Of the single detected homes, 171 are 3 bedroom homes, 122 are 4 bedroom homes.
What is important here is that there is so little on the market. KW has a population of about 300,000. The average household has 2.5 people. That means that there are 120,000 households in KW.
There are 120,000 households in KW but only less than 1% want to sell.
Rising Damp
Rising Damp. It sounds like a movie title or the name of a early 90s Goth band and it very well could be. But is also a condition that at least one house (debatable) in Kitchener Waterloo has.
What is rising damp? Please read about that here.
Captured thought. Where do I get my news from?
For someone who used to be in advertising agency world and then in the newspaper game I’ve come to realize that I’m not a big fan of either advertising or mass media. You likely aren’t either.
We haven’t subscribed to cable TV for decades and I used to read the newspaper (for free) and I used to subscribe to both the Globe and Mail (on Saturday) and the Economist for a few years when I lived in Taiwan. But not any more. Now I get almost all of my news from my RSS feed. RSS stands for really simple syndication.
I wonder why RSS feeds did not catch on. It is a great way to have the news sent to you. And not just news news, but also blogs and videos and essentially anything you can subscribe to. I read a bunch of marketing blogs on RSS.
According to Seth Godin, other than writing a blog (a practice that’s free, and priceless), reading more blogs is one of the best ways to become smarter, more effective and more engaged in what’s going on. The last great online bargain.
Good blogs aren’t focused on getting as many clicks and shares as possible. Instead, they patiently inform and challenge, using your time with respect. Not click bait but sharing ideas and information.
But wait there is more.
Google doesn’t want you to read blogs. They shut down their RSS reader and they’re dumping many blog subscriptions into the gmail promo folder, where they don’g get read.
And Facebook doesn’t want you to read blogs either. They have cut back the organic sharing some blogs benefitted from so that those bloggers will pay to ‘boost’ their traffic to what it used to be.
When I talk with my old colleagues in the newspaper industry, they always ask where are people going to get their news from when there are no newspapers. The answer is from blogs and rss feeds.
Housing from a global perspective
With the price of housing rising so much and so quickly in most Canadian cities, people often ask “when will it end?’ A report from National Bank Financial shows that Canadian real estate could still get much more expensive.
The report compares Canada’s three largest metropolitan areas compared against 15 major cities in other parts of the world. More expensive than Vancouver are Sydney Australia, Seoul South Korea, New York, Stockholm, Paris, Singapore, Tokyo, London, Beijing, Hong Kong and a host of others.
We are living in a global economy. Capital is going to continue to flow into markets where appreciation and security are expected.
Locally, in Kitchener Waterloo, we are affected by the Toronto surge. What happens there, spills over to here. Our housing inventory is low. Demand is high and prices are up. But you already know this.
Yahoo
Do you Yahoo? I used to Yahoo but I don’t anymore. I haven’t Yahood for a long time.
I was a little sad and nostalgic by the news that Yahoo got sold. Yahoo was once valued at over $125 billion. It created an iconic brand that ruled the Internet in its early days. But over the past two decades, Yahoo slowly got taken out of the game by Google and then Facebook
In the early days, Yahoo was my homepage. I would start my day there, on dial up, with a cup of coffee, reading the news, slowly.
Yahoo was my search engine too. I wouldn’t google anything. That didn’t happen until 2000. I would look it up on Yahoo.
So Verizon, a telecom company bought Yahoo, an internet company.
Makes sense.
Call to action
A few weeks ago, I set up an online forum on my Kitchener Waterloo Real Estate News website. I thought it might be a nice place to ask and answer general or maybe specific questions about local real estate.
Of course, it is just getting started and nobody wants to go first so do me a favour and go over and get the ball rolling. Ask a real estate question.
Do it now before you forget.
Thanks for your help.
I will leave you with this parting thought.
Ideas are like fish, and you don’t make a fish—you catch a fish.
