The book, the blog and the clients – Realtor Keith Marshall’s week in review

Like xmas

Like xmasI spent the best part of the past week holed up in my basement office writing 365 Rules for Real Estate. I’m in the home stretch of the first draft. With redundancies and no editing at all done yet I’m at about 500 rules. I’m getting it all down on paper as my first step. I think that’s a good way to write. The plan is to have the first draft finished by the second week of December. The two weeks over Christmas will be the first (of three) editing phases to weed out the redundancies and choose the 365 best rules, trying to be as broad as possible. There are rules are for buyers, sellers, agents, brokers, for sale by owners, first-time home buyers, buyers of condos, but not for investors. Investors look at houses as financial assets, which they are, but I think homes are more than that. They are neighbours, neighbourhoods, schools and communities. So the plan is to have the first edit finished by January 1, and the second edit completed by the second week of January. I should have 365 Rules about Real Estate finished and ready to publication by the end of January.

I think the time I spent working in the advertising world (as a copy editor) and in the newspaper and magazine publication world has helped me work out the plan.

Plan the work. Work the plan. (That’s a rule.)

I’m using my Dragon Dictation software to do the first draft. It’s a lot faster to get things on paper but it will make the editing more challenging. It’s not 90% accurate, or maybe I just mumble. The dictation software has lousy grammar, but great spelling. When I edit I will have to pay special attention to there, they’re and their.

365 Rules for Real EstateIt did the first proof of the front cover and posted it on Facebook. A lot of positive comments for the idea of writing a book. No one said they hated the cover I think a designer could make it much better. I just did it on my Mac in pages. At this point I’m not going to get hung up on the little things like this.

In real world real estate, Alastair and I had an offer come in on one of our listings. Unfortunately it was a real lowball offer and our clients rejected it flat out. I don’t blame them. Actually we advised them to reject it, which goes against one of my rules of real estate – never let an offered by your side of the table. However, rules are made to be broken (another rule) and this offer was so far from reality we question buyer’s motivation. Sometimes buyers have bad information, perhaps from watching the TV news or bad advice from an unreliable source.

Offers should not be based on what the buyer can afford to pay. They should be based on comparables and the market price. They should be defensible/justifiable (rule).

It’s a bad sign when an offer gets faxed in. It send a message of “I have no confidence in this offer.”. Hail Mary. Press send.

I found an interesting blog (interesting to me) Mary-Allen Stories. Here’s a link. It’s an architectural history of the Mary-Allen neighbourhood. I like the Mary-Allen neighbourhood.

Who could this be?A couple of weeks ago, I discovered a fun website where you can make your own cards. I made this one.

Also in blog news, I finally got started in a series for my own blog called “The definitive guide to Kitchener Waterloo schools, homes and neighbourhoods”. I started with Sheppard Public School in Kitchener’s East Ward neighborhood as I had already pulled all the information for a client we are currently working with.

In other news, we think real estate would be slowing down at this time of year and you can expect it would because it normally does  but we got some new clients referred to us this week and another two clients that we’ve been working with passively both reactivated themselves last week and we were off again looking at houses around the region.

I’m doing and open house this weekend (two actually) on Saturday and Sunday from 2 to 4 at 229 Pastern Trail. I do open houses all winter as lots of people are shopping, mostly getting ideas, for their pending move in the springtime, educating themselves about the market, looking for a good realtor to represent them, help them. I’m always on my best behavior at open houses.

uptownI was in Uptown Waterloo last night and took this great picture.

This blog post was dictated.

 

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