I have a couple of hours here before getting ready for a New Year’s Eve day showing of several homes in Folsom. I’m going to spend it doing a couple of year in review articles. Market watchers may want to watch for the Sacramento County real estate year in review that I’ll do in a few minutes, but I thought I’d write a few personal notes first. On a blog, of course, you want your best effort last because that will push it to the top.

My personal year in review is a very interesting one, I think, in that this was the year that my love-hate relationship with real estate as a career finally resolved itself and pointed more strongly toward one side than the other. By now it’s pretty clear to me: I love this work. I had to go back into the faux comfort of software engineering one more time to realize it, and that final brief trip reminded me of what I didn’t like about that non-sales job: the disconnect between competence and effort on the one hand and earnings on the other. Tom Hopkins talks about the main benefit of sales being that the two are intimately related. (That’s also the main drawback of sales, by the way). Speaking one more time of software: I noticed just now that the company that believed my cheap foreign competitor’s estimate that their site would be done in two weeks has yet to see a launch of that site six months later. Hooray for globalization.

Interestingly, getting back into software ocurred right around the middle of the year. I believe, and will try to show in my next article, that this was also the nadir of the real estate market here. At the very beginning of the year, I was working at REMAX as a team leader for the Real Estate PLUS Team, but my overall production was suffering from my failure to take better control of my incoming leads, and my team was pushing back as I tried to remedy this. A couple of months into the year, the strain of this effort led me to decide to go off on my own as an individual agent at REMAX, and this move gave my sales a temporary boost while wearing me down to the point where software became attractive again.

While working this software opportunity, I did something that in retrospect turned out to be a very good idea, setting up John Lockwood Associates as a California Corporation and striking off on my own. My initial thought was simply to sell referrals and save on expenses, but as the software job turned out to be yet another rat race against cheap Elbonians [yes, I hate Web 2.0 but I LOVE Wikipedia!], a couple of weeks later I found myself flying without a net once more. After a few confused weeks writing some dumb .NET app that eventually got replaced by a less than $300 per year Application Service Provider, I decided to put on a blue suit and go to the Stardust Ballroom once more, i.e., climb back in the car and start peddling wooden shelters again.

That’s worked out extremely well. It was the best real estate Christmas ever. God bless us, everyone.

Looking back, this success also coincided with a period of some good Boddhichitta development on my part (that’s not a bad article as it applies to martial arts — it applies well to real estate, too). If I could extend that to Web 2.0, I’d be really cooking.

While this was happening, another wonderful thing came to pass. Bridget joined me, and so did Elite Properties. So in the course of the year, I’ve come full circle — leader of a real estate team, individual real estate agent working for another broker, get the heck out of this job, independent real estate broker on my own, and leader of a real estate team again.

My personal journey in real estate in the year behind was not much different from many agents in the business, who move when the markets shift either toward a second income or toward greater professionalism in real estate, or both. As a businessman, I belive in 2007 I need to grow both as an individual performer and as a team leader. The lesson I learned from the first team was that doing another salesperson’s prospecting for them is like giving a man a fish — pretty soon you run out of fish. So this year I’m experimenting with teaching others how to fish. But I’m not counting on their fish. I’ve got my own fish.

However, to my fellow area real estate bloggers out there, lest I forget — HELP WANTED: Fishermen. Inquire at (530) 672-9160. (The pier’s getting pretty crowded, so my new business model is to own the pier — not bad, huh?)

Have a great year everybody!

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