Realty Bites

Do you have distant family members who send you a Christmas letter every year but don’t interact with you at any other time? How about friends who send a canned greeting card on your birthday but don’t include a personal note?

I call this type of communication “relationship pinging.” It’s a term I coined about twenty years ago. At the time, I was receiving messages from a former college classmate who would send a mass e-mail to everyone in her address book. The theme was always the same: “Here’s a cause or charity I’m interested in at the moment, and I expect you to contribute.” She reacted angrily when I responded, simply, “Unsubscribe.”

I’ve had people alert me every time a dog goes missing at a Wal-Mart somewhere in America. Some people send me every joke that comes across their desk. Others want me to know about every bulletin they see on Fox News or MSNBC. These messages are always about them, not me or us.

The etymology of the term “relationship pinging” will be obvious to some of you. In the early days of personal computers, Internet connections were not persistent. That is, if you failed to type a keystroke every few minutes, your connection would “time out” and  be lost. You would then have to log in again, a powerfully annoying feature. Some bright young programmer came up with a little bit of code you could run on your computer that would “ping” the connection at regular intervals to keep it from timing out. A ping was just a tiny packet of meaningless information sent to the server to remind it that you were still there.

Relationship pingers are doing the same thing — trying to keep the relationship alive with minimal effort and no meaningful contact. It’s a phenomenon that has existed for centuries, but it is particularly prevalent during the age of Facebook, when people have replaced actual friends with “buddy lists.” People no longer get together to share stories of their lives over a sidecar. Instead they post to their “wall” once in a while. Some have taken it to a perverse extreme, tweeting every few minutes to let their “followers” know, “I’m eating the awesomest burrito right now.” (Thanks to Alex Watts for that one.) The personal relationship is dead.

I sometimes feel this blog is an extension of that problem. There isn’t enough interaction here to give me the sense that anyone is actually reading my posts. Of course, this is mostly my fault for not publicizing this blog, but I wonder. Do people actually read blogs? I don’t know. But I’d love to hear from you.

If you don’t know, I like to take pictures. As a kid, I tooled around with my all-manual Minolta SRT-201 and thought I was hot stuff. Until, that is, my brother Steve picked up a camera. It was instantly clear that he was the one with creative talent, so I dropped the hobby and didn’t take another photo for decades. Four years ago, a good friend who loves electronic gadgets and knew I was leaving for a month-long trip to Europe gave me a lovely gift — a digital camera that could fit in my pocket. I’ve been having fun with it ever since, without a trace of sibling rivalry, of course.

I know this has nothing to do with real estate, but I thought you might enjoy seeing some wildlife pictures I took recently on an extended trip to Florida.

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Eastern Lubber Grasshopper

I came across an old post on my friend Laura Koehne’s blog this week. It’s from last year (all right, all right, I’m behind in my reading — aren’t you?), but it’s still fresh and relevant today. Laura is a gifted career coach, and she writes movingly about social networking in the modern age. For those of us who, say, write real estate blogs or spend hours on Facebook and Twitter, so much or our time is consumed by electronic interactions that we neglect the people around us. That’s right, people. Remember them? In the old days, social networking was accomplished by getting together for dinner with your family, going bowling with your friends, having coffee or cocktails with your colleagues — you get the idea. What happened to those days? I’m following Laura’s lead and making most of my interactions with other people in person or at least by telephone. I hope you’ll do the same.

Here’s a link to Laura’s post: Why I’m Not Hiding Any More

C’mon kids. In my very first post I invited you to ask questions, let me know what topics are on your mind. What are you waiting for? Don’t be shy. As anyone who knows me could tell you, I have plenty to say. So, what would you like to hear about? Lay it on me, string bean.

If you’ve been paying attention, you already know my answer: it depends.

Prices are certainly lower than they were two years ago. In some cases, a lot lower. But that old adage still applies: Just because something has fallen in price doesn’t mean it’s cheap. In fact, I believe we have a long way to go before hitting bottom. It may take years for prices to recover. Whether you should buy depends on the answers to quite a few questions, including: 

• Are you upgrading from a less expensive home? If so, the longer you wait as prices fall, the more you’ll save on the house you buy than you’ll lose on the house you sell.
• Are you downsizing? Then the reverse is true. You’ll lose more on the house you sell than you’ll save on the house you buy. Take action as quickly as possible.
• Will you kick yourself if you miss the next real estate boom?
• Can you imagine yourself renting for a few years? (Hint: it’s what I decided to do when the market peaked.)
• Are you honestly willing to pay a fair market price for your home, or do you demand a bargain?
• Do you have a choice? Or is your employer/spouse/school the real decider-in-chief?

The truth is, buying a home isn’t the right choice for everyone. A good Realtor® will tell you when it isn’t. That’s a sure sign he cares more about helping you in the long term than about making sales in the near term, don’t you think?

And the answer is: it depends.

Clearly this is a difficult time to sell, with prices falling daily. I expect them to continue to fall for some time. Properties that are priced right, expertly marketed, and carefully shepherded to settlement will sell. Most likely they will sell for less than they would have two years ago. A lot less. Should you sell? Maybe. I don’t mean to be vague, but the answer isn’t the same for everyone. What you should do really depends on your particular situation. Some questions that affect the decision are:

• Are you selling because you want to buy a more expensive home? If so, the longer you wait as prices fall, the more you’ll save on the house you buy than you’ll lose on the house you sell.
• Are you downsizing? Then the reverse is true. You’ll lose more on the house you sell than you’ll save on the house you buy. Take action as quickly as possible.
• Can you afford to wait five years for prices to improve? Ten years?
• Can you make the numbers work by finding someone to rent your house?
• Are you honestly willing to accept a fair market price for your home, or do you demand top dollar?
• Do you have a choice? Or is your employer/spouse/school the real decider-in-chief?

I often advise my clients to stay put. It’s certainly not something you expect to hear from your garden variety Realtor®. But then, you didn’t think I was your garden variety Realtor®, did you?

Fact is, I see my job as helping people, not selling homes. Sound corny? OK. I can live with that.

Twenty years ago, when I was a tiny little Realtor®, my manager at Coldwell Banker thought it would be a good idea for me to suffer indignities. It would build character, she said. Carolyn sent me to sell homes in Baltimore’s worst neighborhoods. She had me work with the scariest customers. And she wanted me to make cold calls to drum up business.

The cold calls were by far the thing I objected to most. I’ve never liked pushy salespeople, and I didn’t want to become one. So, I did the other things. But to this day, I have not once picked up the phone to solicit business from strangers.

My low-key approach has served me well. More than 90% of my clients are referred by friends or relatives of theirs who have worked with me. I seldom advertise my business.

But when times are tough (now, for example), bringing in a few more clients makes me a happy Realtor®. So I decided to send out some postcards. It’s a kinder, gentler way to attract customers, in my opinion. They went out about a week ago. Here’s what they looked like.

What do you think? Would you mind receiving something like this in the mail? Would you be encouraged to call?

Leave your comments, and I’ll let you know what the response to the mailing was.

Why am I doing this? It’s a question I’ve asked myself many times over the last 40 years. But this time it takes on a special resonance, as I contemplate starting a blog about my unconventional experiences in the very conventional real estate business. Do I really want to lay it all on the line? Share my innermost thoughts? Perhaps. I’ll start with my outermost ones, and we’ll see where it goes from there.

It started when I began my real estate career in 1989. I went to work for some of the well-know brands, beginning with Coldwell Banker. But this being 1989, a major downturn in the real estate market was just getting underway. Within a year, it was decided Coldwell Banker no longer needed a Baltimore office. I moved to Better Homes and Gardens, which couldn’t survive either. Within a year, the company was sold to Prudential. After a year, that company, too, pulled out of Baltimore.

I swear none of this was entirely my fault.

Now, I know you don’t start a company looking for job security, but that’s exactly what I did. In 1992, I founded The Kupritz Group, Real Estate Professionals, Inc. It’s been in business ever since. MORE →