Today is Thursday November 17, 2016 and this is the 44th episode of the Marshall Report. Welcome to the podcast.
In this week’s podcast:
1. Christmas in November
2. Question of the week: Taking the pictures down
3. Diners and diner food
4. Real estate as a big boat
5. Unfriending
6. Words per minute
7. Small town living
8. What does Trump’s election mean to Canadian real estate
9. Choosing
10. Keep it simple
Let’s get on with the show
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Christmas in November
Six weeks till Christmas, I guess I should make a list. I’m a good list maker but a lousy shopper. A lot of people don’t like shopping. I’m one of them. I like Amazon though. I check out the reviews and the related products. I’m not in a rush so I just select regular delivery. Sometimes it comes just as fast, which is nice. When the guy comes, he’s like one of Santa’s little helpers. Delivery days are like mini-Christmases. Christmas in November, Christmas in December, Christmas all year round. Thank you Amazon
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Question of the week: Can I get the photos of my new home taken off the internet?
I received an email from a guy who just bought a home and was wondering if he could get the photos online taken down?
I wrote back: Now that the sale is closed, you can ask your agent to contact the listing agent to take down the photos. It should be as easy as that. When listing the home, the listing agent received permission from the sellers to advertise the home but once title passes to you, that permission essentially expires.
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Burgers and fries. What kind of pies?
When I lived abroad for most to the 1990s, the one thing I think I missed the most was diners. With the recent closing and then the surprise reopening of the Harmony Lunch – a place I only went to once, I got to thinking about diner food. Diner food to me is hash browns and waffles, hot turkey sandwiches and meatloaf. Burgers and fries. What kind of pies? Home fries, scrambled eggs, souvlaki, milk shakes, western omelettes, chilli and toast. You get the idea.
Diners are the places where you always order the coffee. It comes out of a big steel urn and is served in a small porcelain mug. There will be a bowl of creamers and sugars in a bowl. Diner furniture is steel stools with foot rails, formica tabletops and heavy wooden chairs.
I’m talking about places where the waitress will ask if you want gravy on your fries, where the coffee comes in bottomless cups and on the walls are almost unrecognizable faded photographs of days gone by and mostly forgotten and restaurant reviews from long retired food reporters.
I’m talking about places where they have long formica lunch counters and you sit on red leather stools that are fat and sturdy, just like their patrons. The waitresses wear polyester uniforms and cotton aprons and they call you “hon” or “sweetheart” and they smell like lavender and nicotine.
Some of the best diners in Waterloo Region include:
Slices in downtown Kitchener
Jimmy’s Lunch on Victoria
The Corner Pub on Ottawa St.
The Prime Bar-B-Q on Highland
Angies on Erb
Countryboy on Fairway
Kypreos on Lancaster
Come to think of it, we have lots of diners in Waterloo Region.
So what if the Harmony Lunch closes or doesn’t.
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Real estate as a big boat
I like to say that the real estate market is like a big boat, its hard to turn around.
This year the real estate market has been like a cruise ship hit by a typhoon. While the captain and crew rearrange the deck chairs and look for a course to calmer waters, the passengers try to go on enjoying their vacation and their lunches. It is tough. It is tough to enjoy your lunch when the sea is rocking, when you are under a lot of stress, when you might find yourself shipwrecked at the end of a three hour cruise.
We are not over it yet. We might be heading into the eye of the storm though.
Last week I had a client who put a offer in on a place listed in the $380s. We figured with two other offers maybe $404 would do it. It didn’t. We were blown out of the water. Someone paid more than $450 for the place. They bid more that $45K over our offer, more than $60K over list price and most importantly, more than $15K over the price of a by far superior house that sold last month in the neighbourhood.
They paid too much.
But the sale price is the market price so they paid what the market told them to pay.
I’ve been saying that things have calmed down and they have a little, but we are still skirmishing in certain price categories and neighbourhoods.
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National Unfriend Day
Today is November 17, that is National Unfriend Day. It is the day when we should go to our social media accounts and slim things down a bit. Maybe there is an old co-worker that you didn’t really like or one that has turned her facebook account into a real estate sales site. Maybe you don’t like the politics of one of your friends or maybe they post too many cooking videos or they always want your help saving he whales.
All that noise and clutter is making me crazy. Facebook used to be a place for family and friends, at least that what I thought it was.
So today is National unfriend day. Do it. You’ll feel a lot better for it.
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Here is a captured thought
I type about 28 words a minute. That’s it. You would think that with all the blogging I do my speed would be faster, but somehow my mind simply does not work that way. My speed may actually be slower than 28 words a minute if you consider how much autocorrect helps me out.
I learned how to touch type in grade 9. Back then I never got faster than about 12 words a minute. So I suppose all this work in front of a computer has helped. I’ve more than doubled my speed in the last 40 years. At this rate by the time I’m 100 I will have a decent speed.
Also for the record, and as for thumb typing I was much faster on my Blackberry that I ever got on my iPhone.
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Small town living
With the city people moving to the near-cities like Kitchener Waterloo, some near-city people are moving to the country. Wellesley is 30 minutes away. Baden is 20, St Agatha is 15. It’s a nice drive.
For the record, I hate the country. I grew up in too many remote backwaters to truly appreciate the peacefulness and the great expanse that countryside living offers. I only see inconveniences. But I know in my heart of hearts that there are a lot of advantages to living in the middle of nowhere, living in a small town I should say.
Here are three:
You get bigger houses on more land for less money.
You get a pleasant drive through the countryside to and from work
You get small town friendliness, local markets, activities and events
On the other hand:
I think it is harder to make new friends. Life might be more solitary.
It takes more effort to do most things.
An extra 30 minutes to work takes an hour out of your day. However this might be a great chance to chill out and listen to a podcast.
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I never thought we’d have a Trump presidency, none of us did.
Now that the shock has worn off and the financial markets have calmed down, we will all accept this November surprise and then in time we will find out what it will mean to us in Canada.
So what does the trump presidency mean to Canadian real estate. I wrote about that here.
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Call to action
This week’s call to action is to hire a friendly realtor. The business of real estate is set up in the spirit of cooperation. However there are a lot of egotistical, rude, and arrogant realtors out there.
Other realtors do not want to work with them. And neither should you.
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K.I.S.S.
I will leave you with this parting thought. Sometime the question is complicated but the answer is simple. Break it down. Try to find the simplest answer for the simplest part of the problem.
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