AUG 6, 2022
A while ago, I bought myself an e-reader in hopes that I would stop hoarding paperback books. It didn’t work. I realized I enjoyed holding the chapters in my hands while feeling the pages flip through my fingers. I can’t remember who, but when asked about the difference between a photo and a painting, they responded: Layers.
I feel the same about books — and people.
When I read, I gravitate towards: (1) fictional stories of people that feel like me, or (2) psychology. I’m still fleshing out my thoughts, but I started to ask myself why I was drawn to these 2. It’s probably the same reason why I love people watching.
I’m drawn to inwardness.
What I enjoy most is getting to know the inner workings of others. It’s why I don’t like large outings — makes it too difficult to go deep when I’m bouncing from person to person. I’ll save the rest for next week, I don’t want to distract from today’s focus on real estate.
As of this Tuesday, I’ve officially had 2 separate offers accepted for clients that I’ve been working with for months. One of my clients involved so many trips and showings that I actually stopped tracking it out of exhaustion — I’d estimate that we’d seen close to 50 homes together. The key lessons I’ve learnt are:
It feels rewarding, and humbling. It’s a privilege to earn your client’s business through hard work and I want to highlight how difficult it is be responsible for everything from start to finish. Although I made more money working at other companies, I feel a different level of satisfaction because I’ve learnt how to fish.
There hasn’t been a single day in the last few weeks that I haven’t thought about what I want the trajectory of my company to look like. At my core, I know that whatever I do, the mission behind our existence is to help people. Taken from the scope of a real estate broker, we want to help people achieve their American Dream through homeownership. We want to be a real, real estate company.
Ultimately, I know that my long term goals involve becoming a large institutional investor: buying & selling skyscrapers, apartment buildings, hotel chains, etc. One of the things I’ve learnt, thanks to S, is balancing the raw up-in-the-clouds thinking of an entrepreneur with the back-down-to-Earth limitations such as time and finances. I suppose only time will tell.
On a more somber note, the U.S. has entered a recession (2 Q of GDP contraction)… despite the president refusing to admit it. I wrote about this a few weeks ago, and my advice remains the same: hold onto cash until the FED reverses course. I don’t need a rocket science degree to know that my clients’ offers were accepted due to the volatility of rates.
Checkout this video to learn more about how recent rate hikes have been affecting both my buyers and sellers, and what I’m doing to put my clients’ best foot forward.
