It’s a lonely feeling here this morning. The office is always lonely, just me sitting here and talking or typing. People come and people go, but most of the time it’s just as it is now. Me. In this office, doing whatever it is that I can do to sell this or list that, again and again. With that physical isolation I still rarely feel truly lonely. I don’t feel that way because I have contracts to keep me company. I have deadlines and dates and actionable items that must be done by those pesky deadlines. There are contracts to buy small homes and big homes, and during a year such as this where I’ve been blessed with so many more deals than I could have ever imagined, there wasn’t much time to be lonely.
Today, it’s different. Today, after last Friday, after what will likely be the last closing of 2012 for me, there are still manilla folders littering my desk and standing at attention on a wire rack on another desk to my left. They have names scribbled on them, but none of those names are particularly happy with me. Those are not the names of buyers who are buying, not the names of people who are anxiously awaiting the date when they too will be part of the Lake Geneva vacation home scene. Those are just names of sellers, names that I value and need but not names representing files with any particular urgency. Today, this lonely winter morning, I’ve run out of deals.
Real estate in a small market is always like this. Even during fabulous years there are moments of quiet, moments when there isn’t a deal in sight. I routinely spend two or three months a year in transaction drought, and even during 2012 when I found myself spinning together $23MM worth of deals I spent what feels now like at least two months in a sales drought. Real estate either feels very easy or very hard, and there are few times when the business of real estate feels just right. It’s either too hot or too cold, too busy or too slow, it’s rarely just right and after 16 years of this I’ve become quite used to the broken rhythm of this business. Real estate is not an annuity. There are not continued returns. There are just sales and then more sales, and when you pocket ten sales the only thing you really need is number 11. There is no way to be satisfied with being busy, and there’s nothing good about being slow.
The thing about today, the thing about not having a single pending sale, is that I’m not entirely worried about it. Regardless of the macro issues facing America today, there’s plenty of reason to believe that 2013 will be just fine. I see the real estate market holding pace during December in a way that it couldn’t have dreamt of during the spring of 2009. I see opportunity, and as long as prices continue to stagnate and liquidity surges, we’ll see a mostly bright coming year.
What else can I do on a day like today but think those sorts of thoughts? I’m about as far away from my next Lake Geneva summer as is possible, and I must admit to being far more worried about when the HVAC guy shows up to install some metal heat runs than I am about the next smallmouth that will hit a small white jig off the western side of Conference Point. There will be play time in a few months, time to warm my arms under a generous sun, time to drift along on a white boat over a still weekday lake, but for now I have a house that needs some help being built, and I have a large stack of sellers impatiently waiting to have a buyer matched next to their name.
Very nicely done post!