Hello? Yes, it’s me, Mike. It’s been, what, a year or so since I last wrote?
I suspended sending out my updates once the lockdown went into full effect.
I couldn’t fathom anyone would want to hear from me talking about life and real estate because I was convinced we were on the brink of a full-scale collapse in the economy.
And, for about a week, I was right.
I decided to lay low and ride out the lockdown until the virus went away. I was sure everyone would pull together and do the right thing by staying home and allowing the virus to die.
Whoops.
14 days turned into 30.
30 to 60.
60 to, “Holy ducks in hell! I may need to collect CERB.”
During those 60 days, I was not taking on any new clients unless they were people I knew or were referred to me by people I knew.
Business went way down for me and I was OK with it for a while because I didn’t really want to be out meeting people with the virus going around.
But, I noticed that after April, the market was freaking nuts.
I brushed it off to it being the leftover homebuyers that still had a valid mortgage approval. By May, I saw otherwise.
Still, without any kind of measured control from the morons “in charge” of the real estate industry (the head of TREB didn’t suspend open houses until well after the pandemic) trying to deal with the virus, I felt it was too risky.
I met with a couple of clients in mid-March and we decided that we would use sanitizer and wear gloves and foot booties to go through houses. That would keep us from getting sick, right?
They decided they liked the house and would bid on it on the offer date. I thought the agent was an idiot thinking people would bid on a house during a pandemic.
Low and behold, there were several offers. Who was the idiot now?
The house didn’t sell that night. The sellers didn’t get the price they were looking for.
I proved myself right, the agent was an idiot after all! With my self-esteem back in check, we waited for the next house to hit the market.
Fast forward to August, the market was red hot, they had offered on several properties and still hadn’t been successful as the prices inched towards out of reach for what they wanted.
During those 5 months, I was in a tug of war with my emotions.
I needed to make sales to, you know, provide for my family, but I was still only working with a limited amount of people. People I knew were following the pandemic protocols.
So, it wasn’t until August that I made my first sale of 2020.
Meanwhile, all I ever saw from other agents were how busy they were and how the market was setting record prices.
Was I jealous of them?
No.
I knew that eventually the right house and situation would come up for my clients to buy.
It took a lot of encouragement to ease my worried wife that our finances would even out. Once September came around, and into Thanksgiving, business was brisk.
The thought of writing blog posts and sending out newsletters didn’t seem right at the beginning of the pandemic and even less right once things began to settle with protocols in place because I knew there were some people who were going through the same money-crunch that I did at the beginning of the pandemic but were still going through their own crunch.
This entire pandemic has made many of us switch the way we work and I believe it’s for the better.
It has forced many of us to realize that nothing is permanent. It has made us realize that no one is going to take care of us except ourselves.
Many of you have found side hustles or have picked up several part-time jobs at places or in industries that you’ve always wanted to work in rather than trusting “job security”.
With the vaccine around the corner, I truly hope this will allow us to get back to our social norms.
I don’t think most of us will go back to our “work” normalcies though. I believe most have come to realize that there is way more to life than working our asses off.
Talk to you again soon.
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