Eric in front of one our most recent sold homes holding a thumbs up.

Whenever someone asks me “How’s the market?” or wants to talk about interest rates, my initial response is to say how many homes we have under contract at that time. 

It’s my way of saying we aren’t waiting for the market to get better and we aren’t waiting for interest rates to go down. There’s so much negativity in the real estate market from the media and other Realtors so in large part this is my response because it reminds me to stay positive. It’s much harder to be negative about the real estate market when you have 10 homes under contract. 

The flip side of this is I’m not going to give anyone advice based on being unrealistically optimistic. In Jim Collins’ book “Good to Great” he wrote about the “Stockdale Paradox.” The short version is…

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Eric wearing a blue New York Mets baseball hat with bright orange

At the closing of their home sale a couple of weeks ago, the sellers told me 10 of their neighbors stopped by to say goodbye, and they all said they are going to sell next year. What surprised me is all the neighbors asked if the sellers had to negotiate and brought up negotiating is one of their biggest fears about selling their home. 

Many people seem to be intimidated by the idea of negotiating in general and intimidated because they believe people buying homes around here have a reputation of being shrewd negotiators.  

They aren’t. At least not for those of us who have been around the block and can anticipate typical negotiating tactics and who aren’t afraid of being direct. 

Most people think I’m from Texas or maybe California. I’m…

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