Today is Thursday August 4th 2016 and this is the 29th episode of the Marshall Report. Welcome to the podcast.
Coming up in this week’s episode:
1. The Marshall Reports
2. How long will it last?
4. Changing your neighbourhood
6. The problem with horses
7. Taxing foreign ownership in Vancouver
8. Rio
9. Googling others
10. Poetry
Let’s get on with the show.
The Marshall Report podcast
I have had more than 800 downloads now of this podcast. I podcast every week and when I missed a couple firstly because I was too too busy and the second time because I was away on holiday, when I missed them I actually got emails from a couple of regular listeners telling me to keep it up.
That’s encouraging.
So I went in and looked at my stats again. Here they are:
Most of my listeners are from Waterloo at 150 downloads, Kitchener at 149 downloads and Toronto at 111 downloads. Then we have Mississauga at 45 and Cambridge at 31.
Other cities in the top ten include Brampton, Etobicoke and North York.
In terms of listeners outside of Canada, the number two country is USA at 57. Then comes Korea, Netherlands and Taiwan, all with double digits in downloads.
In all there have been downloads of this podcast from 62 different countries and that’s pretty cool, but it is the ones nearby that I really like to see. Real estate is local after all.
The bad news is that I told my colleague Enzo about my podcast. He googled The Marshall Report and turns our that there is a right wing Trump supporting political blog with the same name.
Google that.
How long will this last?
One question that often gets asked about real estate is: “How long will it last?”, as in “How long will prices continue to rise?” or “How long will there be no inventory to buy?”, or even “How long will interest rates remain low?” Great questions.
KW Titans
Kitchener Waterloo’s new professional basketball team has finally decided on a name – the KW Titans.
The name was chosen from more than 500 entries. Some of those entries included: The Rim Rockets, The High Techs, the Angry Amish and the Quantum Leaps.
Our new team will be part of the central division playing against London, Niagara, Windsor and Orangeville. The league will begin it’s 6th season later this year.
Changing your neighbourhood
The city of Waterloo is following Kitchener’s lead and establishing a neighbourhood strategy. The new strategy will focus on
Increasing social connections
Improving neighbourliness
Fostering inclusivity
Building a sense of belonging
Enhancing place making
The idea is to strengthen neighbourhoods and create livelier and more connected communities.
As you know, I always say that neighbourhoods are more important than houses. You can change your house but you can’t change your neighbourhood. Well it looks like both the cities of Kitchener and Waterloo are going to try to prove me wrong.
Happy Birthday
Yes that’s right I’m talking to you. I want to take this opportunity to wish you a happy birthday. It’s likely not your birthday, but maybe you have one coming up. Or maybe you just had one. I don’t know.
I don’t know, unless of course we are facebook friends. If we were then I’d know.
For the record, I used to be a big fan of facebook. Maybe it came out at just the right time. Maybe I was an early adopter. Maybe I was just like everybody else. It was and arguably still is a very good platform.
But I, like most people got bored or didn’t find value in all of the algorithm changes. I like chaos sometimes. Life is random and I don’t really want to always be served up things that facebook thinks I will click on.
Life is too short.
Facebook has changed. I think it was, or is just another stepping stone on the land bridge from the pre-internet, post-industrial age into the post-internet, information age. When we look back, that is what we will find.
Stepping stones are slippery.
Land bridges get washed away.
Facebook used to be for friends and family. Now I’m not sure what it is. But from what is left of the original Facebook, birthday notifications are one of the few things that still exist. No other social network has managed so well to capitalize on those internet celebrations, quite like facebook. Mostly because facebook has people use their real identities.
In the days before facebook, you actually had to know and remember someone’s birthday. That means, everyone likely got 95-99% fewer birthday wishes. But those were quality wishes, not quick throw away lines, but a real card or a phone call.
I’m not saying that facebook has ruined birthdays. On the contrary, Birthday wishes is actually the most happiness-inducing feature on facebook. It is genuine, just like a well written ‘thank you’ email or ‘congratulations’ email instead of a card. Just because it is easy doesn’t mean it doesn’t mean anything. More is not better, but its not bad.
Here is a captured thought.
In the 1890s New York City had a huge environmental problem. The city was getting buried in horse manure. No technology that existed could solve the problem. Twenty years later, cars solved the problem.
Here’s the thought. Don’t try to solve every problem today. Sometimes problems solve themselves.
New Tax on foreign ownership in Vancouver
This week, the B.C. government introduced a new 15% tax on all non-citizen and non-permanent-resident buyers of residential real estate in Metro Vancouver. I wrote about that here.
Blame it on Rio
The Summer Olympics starts tomorrow in Rio de Janeiro. Participants from a record 206 countries including first time entrants from Kosovo and South Sudan will be taking part. There will be 306 sets of medals handed out over 28 Olympic sports including rugby sevens and golf, which were added in 2009.
Rio is the first South American city to host the summer olympics, where it is currently wintertime.
Call to action: Google people before you meet them.
The internet is truly a wonderful invention. Now that it has been around for a couple of decades, all but the most steadfast Luddites use it on a regular basis. Clients of mine are always telling me things about houses and the owners of houses that I find both amazing and a little disconcerting. But it is what it is and I’m not here to debate privacy. Google knows who you are, enough said.
This week’s call to action is to google people before you meet them, not because you’re a stalker. On the contrary. It is expected. You should google people before you meet them so you can talk about things that interest them. I’m going to start doing this.
And of course if they run a right wing political website, like the Marshall Report, maybe you don’t want to meet them at all.
Of course if you google Keith Marshall besides me, you will find an american football running back and a moderately successful singer from the early 80s.
I will leave you with this parting thought.
The truth is like poetry and most people hate poetry
