Today is Thursday October 6th and this is the 38th episode of the Marshall Report. Welcome to the podcast.
In this week’s podcast:
1. Cooking chili
2. How many previous owners is too many?
3. Blackberry
4. Two condo projects
5. Avocados
6. Not working 9 to 5
7. Moving back into town
8. New and old
9. Weasel words
10. Playing your part
Let’s get on with the show
Chili
I stumbled across a website with 15 unique chili recipes, which was great timing because every autumn I make a big pot of chili. It’s a bit of a new family tradition. The recipes aren’t really necessary. Members of my family don’t cook with recipes. We wing it. But recipes are still important for ideas. Like a couple of years ago I started putting a can of sweet corn into my chili. Wow, what a difference that makes.
I know my chili will never win any competitions, it never comes out just the same. But it is always eatable. I guess it is one of those things that is hard to screw up.
Anyway, once the weather turns cool it’s time for me to find the slow cooker and start chopping onions and tomatoes. It’s going to be great.
But not yet, the weather has to get cooler still.
Question of the week: How many previous owners is considered too many?
Homebuyers are always looking for clues to a home’s history. One question that comes up a lot is how many owners has this house had? That question implies that more owners is worse than fewer owners. I agree. With more owners you don’t know who did what, when. I wrote about that here.
Blackberry
When we moved to Waterloo, it was the summer of 2000. That’s when I first heard of blackberry. One of my neighbours was in tech and he worked at RIM. At the time, I didn’t really think much of it. It was like talking to a neighbour who is maybe a mechanic or a marketing expert. I didn’t know that I would soon have a Blackberry and how RIM would impact my future real estate career.
I have to say that like most residents of Waterloo Region, maybe like most Canadians, I am proud of being part of the Blackberry story. It was a great piece of equipment. It was my first smart phone and it made cellphones new and exciting again. I still miss typing with my thumbs. It was so easy to send emails with a Blackberry. That I still miss.
Last week, Blackberry announced that it will stop designing and producing smartphones. That time is gone into the dustbin of history. I guess we all knew it would happen sooner or later.
RIM was a unique company. Everyone knows that it got its start at the University of Waterloo. But many don’t realize that that was in 1984, 16 years before I heard of it, 13 years before it went public, 22 years before it released its first line of consumer friendly devices, 27 years before it crested the wave and then quickly fell free of the realm.
My comment above about RIM impacting my future real estate career is all collinear or collateral. I know RIM wasn’t the only one, but they were the most famous local tech company and without Blackberry, I don’t think we, as Kitchener Waterloo, would be on the map as a tech hub. Blackberry had a huge impact on Waterloo Region and as a local real estate agent, when I look at my clients from the past two years, nearly half are in tech. I think it is safe to say that Blackberry impacted all of our lives.
Two condo projects
A couple of big real estate projects were recently in the news.
The first is 155 Carolyn Street, which started out as the sister project to 144 Park. But then Mady went into receivership and VanMar eventually took over. The Waterloo City Council approved changes to the building allowing for 23-storey condo project with 207 units and 300 bedrooms. In the original plan, it was a 19-storey building.
In Kitchener, The Barra Castle project moved ahead with zoning changes approved. On the site of the former Barra Castle, a seven-storey 107-unit condominium will be built. The project may also include some townhouses and semi detached homes.
Avocados
I don’t think I’ve mentioned this on the podcast before, but one winter long ago I worked on a kibbutz in the north of Israel. It was a large kibbutz and it was attached to an avocado farm. I spent my mornings high in the trees picking avocados. That was about 1987, maybe 1988. That was really my first introduction to avocados.
Avocados are native to Mexico but are cultivated in California, Peru, Columbia, Indonesia, Kenya and throughout the world in other tropical and Mediterranean climates.
A recent story in the Washington Post says that the Avocado is now (North) America’s favourite fruit. (I thought it was bananas.) Since 2005, the number of Avocados we have consumed has doubled and since the 2000 consumption has grown by nearly four times. I have to say, besides bananas, in my household, we almost always have avocados too.
Free trade with Mexico has a lot to do with avocados popularity. They ripen after being picked, so they travel fairly well. Avocados have been cited for their health benefits and they are very versatile – they can be used in salads, soups, appetizers, sandwiches, and of course Mexican food.
Working 9 to 5, not
It has been ten years now that I have left behind the 9-5 grind. I don’t miss the Friday morning meetings, the refrigerator in the lunchroom, the dusty parking garage and the office small talk (actually, I miss that a bit). I don’t miss getting up at 6:30, taking a shower and putting on a suit, commuting to the office.
I’ve never been a team player. Working in an office never really worked for me. I liked the camaraderie. That’s about it.
I don’t think working in an office really works for anyone. It is not really natural. Going to the office was an outgrowth of going to the factory. That’s where the tools of production were – and my office had lots of tools, mostly in management.
Before the industrial revolution, most people worked on farms. Farmers do the work that needs to be done, when it needs to be done.
I was reading a couple of articles last week that got me thinking about how we work. The first was on Bloomberg and was titled “It’s time to kill the 9 to 5”. It argues that the 9 to 5 schedule doesn’t conform to most people’s lives, their work styles and is bad for their health and psychological wellbeing.
Getting your work completed is more important than being ‘at work’.
There are lots of companies tinkering with the traditional schedule in lots of ways, like a four-day work week or a six-hour workday, which is based on the idea that most people will be more productive if they have fewer hours to complete their work.
There are a lot of good reasons to try to work more intensely for shorter times, as productivity can only be sustained for so long every day. It’s like having a tank of gas – you can either drive fast or slow but the destination is the same.
Happy people are more productive.
Fewer hours creates scarcity. By limiting the time, you will accomplish as much.
A book that had a big impact ten years ago on the way I think was Tim Ferris’s 4-hour work week. After reading it, I managed to eliminate most of the unproductive things I was doing and schedule and batch my most important activities. I also identified my most productive times and blocked those off for productive activities.
I like to track everything too. What matters can be measured. I think Tom Peters said that.
Technology is probably the biggest driver of the change in my and other people’s work style. The information age is the biggest shift since the industrial revolution. It’s time for 9 to 5 businesses to take a good look at the ways that they can benefit from it.
Moving back into town
A new study out of the University of Toronto has three big takeaways about the back-to-the-city movement.
The first is about timing. Urban areas began to decline over the 50’s and 60’s and by the 1980’s downtown areas were the poorest and had the lowest levels of education, relative to the suburbs. Then just about the year 2000, this dynamically changed and well educated and affluent households started resettling in urban cores.
Cutting commute times, living near work and a large concentration of high paying knowledge, professional, tech and creative jobs in the core seem to be the driving forces to this demographic shift.
Of course with the affluent and educated moving in, the lower-income and less-educated are being pushed out and this is a bit of a problem as urban centres tend to have the services and job opportunities that these people need.
New and old
I want you to think about Canada’s economy as if it was Kitchener-Waterloo. OK? Now say the housing percentage of the economy makes up the equivalent of Waterloo. That’s jobs and materials, lawyers and lumber, carpenters and concrete. And now within Waterloo at the neighbourhood level we have immigration.
One of the things that is impacting our housing shortage (to some degree) is immigration. Last year, we had the highest number of newcomers arrive in Canada, more than 320,000. That is a one-third more than the year before. Our immigration minister has stated that we are trying to boost immigration levels to help cope with our aging population.
Last year was the largest annual number in a single annual period since the early 1910s when Canada was encouraging settlement of the western provinces.
Here are some quick facts:
Canada now has 36.3 million people. Our population grew by more than 1.2% last year.
Ontario has typically been the number one destination province for newcomers.
In 1986, there were twice as many children as senior citizens. Last year, there were a record number of seniors (six million) and there were more seniors than children.
Syrian refugees made up about 10% of new immigrants.
Watching for weasel words
This week’s call to action is to be on the lookout for weasel words. Weasel words are words or phrases that are intentionally ambiguous or misleading. They essentially can be numerically vague expressions like “experts predict…” or the use of the passive voice to avoid specifying authority like “it is thought that…” or by using adverbs that weaken like “often, probably, many…”
We hear a lot of weasel words in real estate and we see a lot of weasel words in real estate advertising. It is a way of saying something without saying anything at all. It is a way of glossing over the facts.
This week’s call to action is to try to find the facts. Look for the specifics. Get the details. Ask direct questions and don’t accept weasely answers.
I will leave you with this parting thought…
Life is random. Things are what they are.
Regardless of where you are in life, you are there for some reason. God, the universe, invisible forces… It doesn’t matter what it is. But when life expects something from you, show up and play your part. That’s what’s required.
