I’m very pleased to announce that I may have recruited my first agent. Did I mention…yes I did, but that lets me segue into mentioning again — we’re hiring.

We’re still working out some details — mainly related to making sure her transition works smoothly with her former broker, but we’re hoping to have a more formal announcement soon.

Last night at a social group I attended, I gave my business card to someone who wanted to add me to their mailing list for the group, and he asked about my owing a real estate brokerage, and I quipped, “Yes, well I do now as of about two months ago. I decided that with the market downturn it was a good time to say ‘Hey, let’s start a business’.”

Of course that was meant as something of a joke — and it got the intended laugh, hooray. But on serious reflection, I find that at any given time I’m as likely to be energized as I am depressed about the way things are going in “the market”.

On one level, I become mindful of my interactions with the online community, and I watch how we sometimes unskillfully talk past one another, slinging hyperboles. And as I watch the feelings that arise out of this, I also begin to understand what’s behind it. I believe I understand some of it: home ownership is out of the reach of some seventy-five percent or more of the people who live here. (Depending on how “traditional” (honest?) you want to be with your numbers — but that’s a whole different article).

As the market adjusts I think there’s a great deal of fear among some that it may still be out of reach as interest gains wipe out the benefits of price reductions, and so there’s an immense hope among many buyers that the prices will shoot downward rapidly.

And of course, the worst aspect of it for me as it relates to discussing things on my blog is dealing with an almost ubiquitous consumer schadenfreude over the misfortunes of my colleagues. And I say my colleagues with some conviction here, since any problems with my income are more related to business model choices on my part than they are inevitable, since I’ve made some fortunate decisions about my prospecting strategies.

Somewhere along the line, however, more good fortune came my way in the form of understanding not only who my real clients are (other agents hurting for business), but also understanding what motivates me (the wish to be useful and helpful to others), and all of this leads me at a rather late age to work on building beginning a real leadership role that I have shunned throughout my life.

So finally, after an article as (misguidedly?) self-revealing as it is meandering, I arrive at what I consider to be the Challenge of a Buyer’s Market, for me personally, at least:

• In pure economic terms: given any reasonably large pie, I am fat not in relation to the size of the whole pie but in relation to my share of it. In a halved market, a four-fold increase in market-share is a 100% raise.
• Market share is within my control. The market is outside it. A skillful response to this would be to focus on the former, not the latter.
• Being of service to other people is rewarding in ways that are immune to market fluctuations.

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