In 1995 I owned a Saab 900. It was gunmetal gray, but it wasn’t a Turbo, so I operated as though those two conditions canceled each ot…

In 1995 I owned a Saab 900. It was gunmetal gray, but it wasn’t a Turbo, so I operated as though those two conditions canceled each ot…
One of the great debates in the business of real estate revolves around pricing strategy. Some agents want listings so bad they’ll pr…
Five or six years ago, Sotheby’s flew me to New Jersey to meet with their executive team. It was time that David Curry, Local, be intr…
Pop Quiz:
Q. How much is a house worth?
A. Whatever someone is willing to pay for it.
This is how valuations work. If I’m selling my h…
I remember sitting at a closing in Elkhorn sometime in late 2008. The sale was of a condominium on the water, and it was a pricey one. The …
I have a friend who is remarkably smart. It bothers me that he’s so smart. Have a thought? It’s wrong. How could he know it̵…
There was a time when I really enjoyed putting this magazine together, or so says the faintest of memories. I printed this magazine for the …
In the business of real estate, there is a tremendous emphasis on the broker. The brand. The website and the signs. But at the same time, o…
Since I dropped out of law school right before I applied, you shouldn’t consider anything I ever say to be legal advice. Ask your atto…
Let’s pretend I’m at a car dealership. Now let’s pretend you can feel my emotions. If you can feel those emotions and you…
For a millisecond, I thought it would be nice to be a developer. Build something, have people pay you more than your cost, make money. It se…
If you follow me on any of the social media platforms, you know a few things about me. You know I like to fly fish. This is important to kno…
I don’t pretend to be a particularly savvy investor. I have friends that are. I am not. I just don’t have the knack for it, and …
I read an article last week about how to write out checks in the new year. If you write 1/6/20 on your check, the article supposed that a th…
There have been many moments over the past 23 years that I’ve wanted to move my real estate office from Williams Bay to Lake Geneva. I…
I blame the television for this one. I also blame the internet, but it should be argued that the bulk of this blame lies with the televisio…
You’re not really in the market for a home if you haven’t looked for said home on Zillow. You may have also used Redfin, Realtor.com, and ot…
One of the reasons I’m bad at this business is that I tend to give people too much credit. I can’t market gimmicks. I’m in…
My cousin recently had a baby. I saw this baby at a different cousin’s wedding over the weekend and my suspicions were confirmed. It…
In case you’re not around Lake Geneva at the moment and would like to peruse the new issue…
Tis the season for dreading the mail. There’s something nice about the season, relating to the mail, I suppose. Each day, my mailbox i…
There are things that I dislike about this business. You know this. I dislike the lack of respect that plagues this career, even while I und…
I went to high school in the basement of a church. To be fair, not all classes were in the basement. Our homeroom was in the kitchen of Cal…
It should come as no surprise that there’s a competition to be what’s next. In this context, we should capitalize What’s N…
A few weeks ago, I wrote an offer on a property on behalf of a buyer. This is no feat. There is no trick to this. It’s just a form wri…
There’s nothing that makes me hate my chosen profession more than leafing through a local glossy magazine. There are lots of glossies …
It’s summer of 2018 and you’re in Lake Geneva. You’ve done several things right to make it here. You’ve made strate…
I have a very simple process when it comes to deciding whether or not a development should be approved. If the development is needed, and th…
If you own a lakefront or lake access home in the Lake Geneva market, you’re well aware of the increased broker competition in our are…
If you’re lucky enough to be a Lake Geneva vacation home owner, then you’re unlucky enough to be unwrapping Walworth County̵…
This very well could have been the Cubs Didn’t Get Swept But They’re Still Terrible Sadness post, but that wasn’t really b…
When I dream, I dream of the good old days. Of the days before these days. The days when things were worse. I dream of anxious sellers and…
We know lots of things. We know that if we don’t cut our grass once a week it will grow too tall and too thick, and when we cut it aft…
This is serious. You’ve been having the pain in your knee for quite some time. It bothered you during your junior year, but what could…
This feels gratuitous, but I have to do it anyway. I could babble on and on about being the underdog, or tell you about how mightily I stru…
We need to have an honest discussion. It’s rare, in any business involving sales, to have such a conversation, but converse we must. …
I might have figured out what’s wrong with me. It’s not that I don’t want to write something every other morning, as I hav…
Well, it’s just me here now. Everyone else has left. The roads are quiet. The houses dark, excepting the one lamp left on to ward away…
I feel as though I’ve been writing more admonitions than entertainment lately. It must be the time of year; the swelling of interest a…
January bothers me. It’s a month of clean starts, of new pledges and attempted changes. It’s a month where things seem possible,…
I’d like to think, after twenty years in this chair, that I’ve seen it all. I’ve seen sellers and buyers of all makes and …
You write an offer on a property. You negotiate the offer. You convince the seller to take your counter offer, or the seller convinces you t…
I’m staring out my office window at an automotive repair shop. This shop just opened, even though the sign says Opening Soon. Will tha…
The business of listing homes is a curious one. If we were going about this business of finding a broker and an agent, we’d assume we&…
I like to brag about certain things. For instance, I have a black SuperJet and there’s very little chance that you do as well. I have …
This is, after all, a business. It’s not hard to think of real estate as a business. The business of the business has an office and a …
There’s a problem in Walworth County. It isn’t that our fields are lush and our lakes wet. It’s not that our towns are bu…
The seller had a tree in her yard that had died many years ago. The tree first lost its leaves. Then it lost some branches, and then, some b…
A sudden twinge of pain. A shallow breath. A pain here, another there. The symptoms of something, but of what? A quick google search reveals…
When I first hatched this idea to write and print a self aggrandizing magazine, I ran the concept past my father. I told him what I’d …