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Monthly Archives: December 2016

Let’s Look Forward

Peering into the future still doesn’t tell me what 2017 has in store for Hermit Haus Redevelopment!

I think a lot of us had some pretty big challenges or disappointments in the past year. I know I did, both personally and in the larger world. It’s easy to get discouraged when the hits just keep on coming, isn’t it? And it’s not surprising that a lot of us are apprehensive about how this next year will go. It’s only human.

A lot of the training we get as real estate redevelopment professionals concentrates on taking our mistakes, disappointments, or missed opportunities and re-framing them as “learning opportunities.” At the end of the calendar year, that’s a good exercise! For example, here are a few things I and my team members have learned in the past year in our business:

  • Weather will always kick you in the rear. Be prepared for weather delays in projects. Oy, just thinking about that Villa Park property!
  • Contractors have expiration dates. Someone can have great references and have wonderful past projects, but if you try them right when they are having outside issues, they might totally flake on you, or say, delay finishing your project because they are secretly living at your house. Not that it happened to us. Sure.
  • Also, just because you’ve used a service more than once in the past and you’ve been pleased, it doesn’t mean the next time you use it will be great. Always have a backup vendor.
  • You can’t count on logic to convince a seller that your offer is good or that you are sincere. People with distressed homes are often dealing with strong emotions. You need to find out what is going on there and address their emotional needs.
  • Before spending months fixing up a house to sell it, find out if there’s someone who wants it as-is so they can do what THEY want to do with it. To prove I’ve learned that lesson…does anyone want to buy a really nice house with ancient green carpet and a couple of “interesting” room colors, before I replace that carpet and repaint the walls in an extremely neutral color?
  • If you don’t act on a lead promptly, it’s not going to become a prospective deal.

I think it’s really important to evaluate things that go wrong, figure out the lessons learned, but then to move on. And that’s my invitation to all of you who read our blogs and our Facebook posts: always look forward. Goal setting helps with that. Russell is always reminding us to revisit our goals daily to keep our focus. He has also suggested the technique of brainstorming daily to think of ways to get to our goals, even if they are a bit wacky. You might come up with something that actually will propel you forward.

While looking forward, I also recommend being consistent. One of my goals is to refrain from trying new thing after new thing, but to also be consistent with your current efforts. For example, one of my goals is to have at least three blog posts a week. We’ve been pretty good about posting at least weekly, but with so many great writers on our team, I’m hoping for more. If you see us slip up, remind us to keep writing!

Consistent marketing efforts, letter writing, phone calling, and researching new properties will get us toward our ultimate goals for deals and profits. And these are all things within our control. Sure, our team can’t control outside forces, political change, or economic hiccups, but we can control our own efforts and most important, our relationships with others. All our contacts, partners, and clients are worth our sincere interest and of keeping in contact for the future.

What are your goals? How are you looking forward to making the coming year a good one, despite your fears and apprehensions? The New Year holiday is a great time to reflect and plan. It’s good for you, no matter what your vocation or avocation!

(Thanks to Anita for helping me think of more lessons.)

 

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Do You Have the Mindset of Wealth or Poverty?

Book cover: Mindset by Carol Dweck

If you want more information on mindset and how to change it, I highly recommend this book, which focuses on obtaining a growth mindset.

I’ve been thinking a lot about mindset lately. Simply put, mindset is your basic attitude — the way you look at the world. Most of what I’ve been reading categorizes mindset into two dichotomous groups:

  • Abundance versus Scarcity
  • Growth versus Fixed

There’s a lot of overlap between these groups. Perhaps overlapping tendencies might be a better way to say it. For example, people with a fixed mindset are more likely to also show characteristics of people with a scarcity mindset. Check it out.

People with an abundance mindset look at ways to grow their income or the economy. When they want something, they don’t ask, “can I afford this?” They ask, “how can I afford this?” As Robert Kiyosaki suggests, if you want to new car, you don’t buy the car; you buy a rent house that makes the payments on the car. That way when the car is paid for, you have both.

People with the scarcity mindset tend to look at the economy and their income as being fixed objects. “You can’t have more unless I have less.” They don’t understand the difference between good and bad debt, between debt that makes you money and debt that costs you money. I ran into this a lot when I was president of my church. Instead of focusing on how to raise enough money to fund the program is the church held as its core values, most people focused on how much money the church already had or on pledges.

The growth/fixed mindset is probably more familiar to most people. The fixed mindset says you are what you are. You’re either smart or dumb, graceful or klutzy. And there’s no way to change. Failures define your limits.

The growth mindset takes every failure as an opportunity to grow. If you don’t understand a concept, learn everything you can about it until you do. If you lose money on a deal, figure out why and don’t do that again. If you suck at an activity, keep practicing until you reach your desired level of competence.

If you think of the two concepts as ends of a line, most people fall somewhere in the spectrum between. Finding someone who is completely in the abundance mindset is rare. Most people have an abundance mindset about some things and a scarcity mindset about others.

I also see mindset as correlating with what psychologists call “locus of control.” The fixed or scarcity mindsets remind me of people with an external locus of control: they believe their destiny is more or less predetermined or out of their control. People with an internal locus of control—people who believe they are masters of their destiny—behave more like people with a growth or abundance mindset.

But here’s the thing: you get to choose your mindset. It’s not usually easy. Like recovering from any adversity or addiction, changing your mindset is a daily activity fraught with setbacks. But in the end, it’s worth doing. Happiness and abundance abound.

Here at Hermit Haus, we work very hard at focusing on our opportunities for growth and for increasing our abundance. These are our core values. The cool thing about the abundance mindset is that we don’t believe we can only get more by taking away from someone else. We find a way that we all come out ahead. It’s not a win-lose scenario; it’s always win-win.

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Are You a Salesperson? Am I?

salesman

I just didn’t want to be this guy.

I’ve always adamantly believed I am NOT a salesperson. I didn’t want to be one of those people who pressure others and get them to do things they don’t want to do. I didn’t want to try to get people to buy or do things just to make myself a commission. It made me really uncomfortable to think about. When I thought about those poor folks at the large bank who pressured people to start savings accounts because they had a quota they MUST fill, I felt so sad.

People have gently pointed out to me that when I think something is great, I can be really persuasive. I am the home sales person’s best friend. Just let me get going about my love of the Pampered Chef ground beef breaker-upper, for example, or about the essential oil product I use for sore muscles. I’ve sold a lot of items for my friends with these kinds of businesses. I think Longaberger Basket stayed in business because of me for a decade or so. And WOW was I persuasive on the benefits of feeding your baby without buying products to do so (a career I used to have, in which I even won awards).

But no, I would not start one of those businesses. Nope. Not a salesperson.

So how did I end up doing this real estate stuff and blogging my little fingers off about what a good thing it is? How do I feel about promoting our business model hither and yon, if I don’t want to be a “sleazy salesperson”?

Well, I’ve figured something out. Sales can be OK if you are actually trying to meet the needs of other people. If you are offering a service that can benefit both yourself AND the other party, sales (and those sales techniques I found so annoying in car dealerships in the past) can be an honorable and ethical practice.

In the past I’d never taken a sales course (just a lot of writing and philosophy courses!), nor did I officially study marketing other than talking to my marketing coworkers a lot. But, since I’m committed to doing my very best to connect my team with people who are the right fit for what we do, I’ve decided to take the plunge and learn about sales and negotiation. I’m in an 8-week online class, along with Russell on our team, which will culminate with some in-person training with two amazing practitioners of sales and negotiation. I feel good about it, because they stress ethics and respect for the people you are selling to or negotiating with. I want to set high standards for myself and maintain them.

I also want to be able to tell when someone I’m working with is using the techniques against me in an unethical way. Hmm.

Real estate is one constant negotiation process. Our coworker Carol is even certified in it! Are you comfortable selling or negotiating? I’m getting better. Practice makes perfect, I hope. Of course, in the class I hope to have plenty of time to make mistakes and learn from them in a safe environment. That’s important as well. Anyone have any thoughts or opinions on this?

 

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A Tour of an Office Bathroom, Some Dogs, and a Business Update

I think I’m getting the Facebook Live thing under control. I was able to do a fairly cohesive update and took my viewers on a tour of the Hermits’ Rest house’s office bathroom (that’s Lee’s and my ranch house in Milam County, Texas). I thought maybe it would be interesting to see how we try to coordinate the choices of finishes in rooms to make them look coherent. It’s something our whole team works on. We want our houses to appeal to today’s buyers in the neighborhood and town where they’re located, but also to not look like every single other rehab on the planet.

There’s also a little business update in there. I can’t get REAL specific, but the good news is that a lot of deals are being worked on, and that gets us all charged up.

We also set goals for next year. Let’s see if we actually do 20 deals and make over $200K! While we didn’t hit last year’s “stretch” goal, we did hit the goal of ending the year making a profit, and having steady income. Now to build on that success.

And oh yes, it’s hard to do a tour of the ranch house without a visit from the ranch pups, so if you are a dog lover, you’ll get to meet our cattle dog, Brody, and our mutt, Harvey, who was dumped down the road from us as a starving 22-pounder. You’ll see that he is no longer Starvey Harvey!

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Sparkle Sells!

The huge front windows are hard to wash unless you’re a pro! They look good now!

Today we went by to check on our property we are getting ready to list for sale. It was so shiny! Why? The windows were being cleaned, that’s why! The owners had only cleaned them professionally once since the house was built almost two decades ago.

What a difference it makes! And that’s a lesson for any of us real estate rehabbers: sparkle sells. Our partner, Carol, says this all the time. When she’s working for a real estate client, she gets their house all clean and shiny, and that includes exterior surfaces, especially the windows.

The shine is on the inside, too! The back yard looks great!

Looking at these pictures, I have to agree with Carol. Let’s hope the sparkle on this house sells it!

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