39 – The Marshall Report – Episode 39

Today is Thursday October 13th 2016 and this is the 39th episode of the Marshall Report. Welcome to the podcast.

On this week’s podcast:

1. October

2. Public easements

3. Beer and banking

4. Year to date real estate

5. Emailing newsletters

6. Driving with pizza

7. New mortgage rules

8. Baby Names

9. 25 to 5

10. Events as pivot points

Lets get on with the show

 

October

October, my favourite month, a changeable month. I noticed last week how the trees were changing colour. I was on the golf course wearing a pair of shorts and a golf shirt. No sweater. Shorts in early October, at Oktoberfest and on my front porch, my summer office. I love this time of year. The warm days and the cool nights, barbecuing just one more time, just one more time I keep saying. I keeping waiting for the weather to change and hoping that it won’t.

Real estate always slows down this time of year for me. Last year, I was making plans to take off and go backpacking around Vietnam. I’m thinking that that was a great idea. I should do that again, maybe India this time or Costa Rica.

October is a weird month. It starts with the end of a start, September the start of school, the end of summer. October ends with the start of the end, the days noticeably shorter, the nights cooler. Settling in. Octo meaning eight. The tenth month of the year. That’s weird. Shouldn’t it be Dectober?

Like I say, the beginning of the end.

 

Question of the week: Do fire hydrants or utility boxes on a property affect its desirability? 

Many houses have some sort of public easement running along the front of the property. I wrote about that on my blog keithmarshall.ca

 

Beer and banking

I was visiting Block 3 Brewing in St Jacobs over the holiday weekend. We got some paddles and did some tasting and then brought a six pack home. It was a unique experience, something like wine-tasting at Niagara-on-the-lake but different, more relaxed and earthy. There are more than a dozen micro breweries in Waterloo Region and Wellington. It is a pretty cool new thing. Five years ago there were two or three breweries. Now we have double digits.

I recently learned that the first craft brewery in Ontario was actually in Waterloo. Brick Brewery open in 1984. It currently brews the Waterloo beers (Waterloo Dark, IPA, Pilsner and Amber) Laker (make ‘r a laker), Red Baron and Redcap as well as some others.

I guess we have beer in our blood here in Waterloo Region. Have you ever noticed that BMO on the corner of King and Erb, etched in the stone, high over the front door is Molson Bank? It was started by the sons of John Molson and had 125 branches in Ontario and Quebec.

Molson bank merged with Bank of Montreal in 1925

 

Year to date real estate 

All-in-all it is still a seller’s market. Inventory is down, the number of sales and prices are up. I wrote about that on my blog keithmarshall.ca

 

Email newsletters

Email, when you think about it is actually the original social media. I wrote about that on my blog keithmarshall.ca

 

Here’s a captured thought

You never drive as carefully as when you have a pizza on the front seat.

 

New mortgage rules

Last week the federal government announced some changes to ensure that we as home buyers are not taking on bigger mortgages than they can afford.I wrote about that on my blog keithmarshall.ca

 

Alabama Frooti

The top names for new babies 2016 is out. In Canada, the top names for girls are: Olivia, Maya, Sofia, Emma, Charlotte, Zoey, Chloe, Sarah, Ava and the every popular Emily.

For boys: Liam, Willliam, Jacob, Lucas, Noah, Nathan, Benjamin, Ethan, and Jackson.

Toping the list for weird names: For boys Alabama, Atlas, Frooti and Chichi. Our dog is named Chichi.

And for girls the top weird names include: Abbott, Apollo, Arrow, Blade and Bobo.

There was a story on the BBC website about a 16 year old girl who has earned about $80,000 with a website that helps Chinese people find suitable English names for their new babies. With limited access to the world wide web, sometimes Chinese knowledge of western names is limited to Harry Potter, Disney movies and luxury brands.

I’m hoping to head over to China in the new year. I remember last time I was there, most of my daily go to sites were blocked.

 

Only five

On a podcast I was listening to, an idea I had heard before came up again. It was to make a list of 25 things that you like to do. Then take a good hard look at that list and pare it down to just five things. You can’t do everything. Life is so full and so full of choices. If you spend two hours watching Netflix, that’s two hours you don’t have for reading or listening to podcasts. You have to decide. Which one do you most like doing. What five things do you really like to do? Do more of those and less of the rest.  You life will be richer for it.  That’s this weeks call to action.

 

Events as pivot points

I started today’s podcast by talking about October, the transitional month. Octoberfest, Thanksgiving and Halloween all happen in October. These are events. Events are pivot points for things we do in life. Other events are getting married, changing jobs, the birth of a child and buying a home (to name a few). The events are important. These events are transitions from one thing to another. But the events themselves are also diversions and distractions. The events themselves are someone trivial compared with the consequences, the aftermath and the effect of the change.

What happens when you are buying a house is trivial two years or twenty years on when you have lived in the home for a while, when you have raised your children, when you have become part of the neighbourhood. Clients get caught up in the little details whereas they should be thinking of the big picture.

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