Luxury Real Estate

By Jim Walberg

From his blog: Economic Meltdown Causes Fear In East Bay Real Estate Community!

No matter how positive and resilient one is, we are in stormy economic times! However, opportunities abound in the midst of this economic hurricane!

I was chatting with my friend, Bob Waun – president of Vacation Finance, which is headquartered in Michigan – about the financial meltdown going on in the credit markets and the stock markets. He asked if I was afraid for what is next for our real estate businesses in the Bay Area and the Caribbean. I told him, “Nah… we are still having the time of our life!” The mantra of a sailor is…, “Do not be fearful!” And, the definition of FEAR is False Evidence Appearing Real! If you didn’t know, my favorite condition in sailing is with the gunnels (side rails on each side of the boat) in the water and salt water spraying all over me. You can’t imagine the big grin on my face while I am sailing in those conditions. However, it is not the time for the faint of heart if you are a sailor in stormy seas. It is the time when experience pays off.

Both our Bay Area and Caribbean real estate businesses are thriving… however, it is taking all hands on deck to pull it off. We are blessed with a great team who only look at the glass half full, and are committed to creating a GREAT experience for our customers. Many of our competitors are running down to Starbucks talking about how the sky is falling. The vacuum they are leaving within our real estate community is amazing, and whoever fills that void today will have a larger market share when the market shifts again – which it will. In order to make it through these tough financial times we all need to work together, side by side, realizing storms don’t last forever. At the end of Bob’s and my conversation, he left me with these thoughts:

Faith, beliefs and conviction can be fickle friends when they are tested by panicked masses. “The end is near!” seems to be the chant of the crowd across the world today. But what of substance has changed within our global economy. Did a world of Fathers change their commitment to feed and clothe their children? Did Mothers decide that the generic brand cereal would be fine in mass? Did we stop wanting nice things and suddenly over the weekend decide to settle for less? What is the shift that causes such a panicked response? What fundamental changes are causing us to doubt the future? Purely fear of what “MIGHT” change. Does that sound rational to you?

Historians and economists can attest that humans don’t always act rationally en masse, but as individuals we can still choose to be rational – to act out of faith and conviction, not panic. ”Looking back on it, I was a trader in the pits of the S&P in 1987. It was the most exciting and profitable stock market opportunity of my lifetime,” a friend told me today… Did he notice it at the time? No. He said he was scared to death, but he kept at his work of trading stocks in the best way he could. Life is clearer in the rearview mirror. Regret is more painful than overcoming fear…

In a storm, it is not time for people to jump ship and swim to safety. A storm is the time for experienced sailors to do their work and sail through it. It doesn’t mean we are not afraid. However, it does require us to not panic – which could cause our ship to go down. I promise we will all will make it through this economic mess. We may get wet and a bit wind-blown, but working together, we will get to a safe harbor and live to see another day when we will look back and tell the stories of how we made it through the storms of 2008 and 2009. Contact me today if you would like some help through your storm. Until next time… fair winds!!!


Editor’s Note:
Jim Walberg is the co-Broker/Owner of The Bay Area Team, the most-successful team at Keller Williams Realty-Danville. He is also a member of the global Luxury Real Estate network. Jim is an exceptional blogger, as you can see by visiting his blogs, East Bay Real Estate and Caribbean Islands Realty, and reading his great blog entries like the one above. He is the master of fractionals and other luxury homes in the Bay Area and the Caribbean, and he always has a lot of great opportunities to share. Such wonderful words of hope! Thank you, Jim, for your marvelous understanding of what is really happening in today’s market. People are filled with great fear at the moment and it’s hard to know what to do when we’re in the middle of so many crashing waves. I trust that wisdom and goodness will lead us to prevail over these hard times. I hope that we will all be wiser about who we put our faith in after we come through this. I am in total agreement with Jim that this is no time to panic or jump ship. Let us return to honesty and kindness, for it appears to me that this crisis was brought on by the dishonesty and selfishness of a few. Now people don’t know who to trust. I hope we will all be trustworthy and good, like I know Jim is.

By Robert Lockard

I recently finished writing an interesting article for the winter 2009 issue of LuxuryRealEstate.com Magazine. The article is on “green” homes, and it was a challenge to write, mainly because I have a number of concerns about the current global-warming scare. I was able to find a lot of good in “green” homes, especially their energy savings and positive health effects on residents. I shied away from discussing their environmental effects, since I am unconvinced that they will have any real ones, and saying that they will might give people a false sense of security.

To be sure, I am all for conservation and avoiding the waste or misuse of our resources. But something is very wrong with the current debate, or lack thereof, on global warming. I bring this up, not only because of my magazine article, but also because I read a very informative article entitled “Hot air over global warming” by Jerome Delvin in The Seattle Post-Intelligencer this morning. I highly recommend checking it out.

As I noted in the Editor’s Note of a July 31, 2008 post to the Luxury Real Estate Blog by Jean-Yves Piton entitled “Green luxury real estate,” many climatologists and other scientists are speaking out about the fallacy of manmade global warming. You can find a great deal of accurate information from top scientists who spoke at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change. It is clear that the Earth’s atmosphere is warming, but there is actually little evidence to suggest that human activity is the main cause.

The data simply does not support the idea that the Earth’s temperature has increased at a steady pace along with the increase in carbon emissions during the past century or so. In fact, in the 1970s global cooling was touted as a major problem facing the world, not global warming. The fact that there was cooling going on during a period of steadily increasing carbon emissions seems to point to the fact that the relationship between manmade greenhouse gases and the temperature of the atmosphere is much more complex than we’re being told.

I believe that regular people can make a difference in the world, often by raising strong families and focusing on the most important things in life. However, it seems to me like this good idea (one person being able to have a positive effect on the world) has been twisted and used inappropriately when it comes to global warming in order to take advantage of well-intentioned people.

I often feel barraged with messages saying that I need to be more responsible and consume less in order to lessen my “carbon footprint” on the environment. I am wary of the rationale behind this argument for a number of reasons. There is little evidence that paying money to plant trees or somehow offset our emissions has a significant effect on the environment. In fact, an interesting study in Reportonbusiness.com found that our return on investment from putting money into the fight against global warming is so low that it’s really not even worth it. The fact is that, despite good intentions, one person, or even 6 billion people, can’t make much of a difference when it comes to global warming.

Returning to the “green” article I wrote, I tried to focus on “green” homes from the perspective of why a person would choose to purchase one. After all, they are more expensive to build, so there must be a promise of future rewards rather than a vague promise of being better for the environment. “Green” homes appear to be very sound investments because they cost less to maintain, contain fewer toxic materials and thus promote the financial and physical health of their inhabitants. I believe that “green” homes can be very good. But I do not think that they are good simply because they have some sort of positive effect on the environment that is, in reality, overrated and insignificant.

I have much more to say on this topic, but I’m afraid I just don’t have time to cover everything. I apologize if I have offended you. I am very passionate when I see injustice, and I wish to put an end to it. I think we need much more information before making changes that might have little or no effect on the problem we think we’re solving.


Editor’s Note:
Robert Lockard is the Public Relations & Media Specialist with Luxury Real Estate. I am Robert. I create all of Luxury Real Estate’s newsletters, write the editorials in LuxuryRealEstate.com Magazine and much more. If you disagree with me, I encourage you to look closely at the data before posting comments. I enjoy healthy discussions in search of truth, but I do not approve of name calling or unkindness. I just posted a blog entry by Simon Turner on Google Maps and “green” luxury homes. I don’t mean any disrespect to him by posting this blog entry. As I mentioned above, I think that there is a lot of good in “green” homes, but I just don’t think that they will make any difference on the environment. Update: This blog entry has been updated to remove two paragraphs.

By Robert Lockard

I’m going to talk about something a little off-topic from my usual discussion of luxury real estate, but which I find compelling and interesting.

On Saturday, May 10, 2008, I ran my first half-marathon at the 2nd Annual Tacoma City Half-Marathon. That was 13.1 miles of pain and unique discovery. I had never run more than 10 miles in one stretch before and so I pushed through some barriers and found some amazing truths on the other side.

I ran the race with one of my sisters, Nicole. She was actually the one who invited me to run this race in the first place. You see, back in October 2007, my left knee began causing me a great deal of pain so I went to a Physical Therapist for two months and did some exercises to get the joint realigned. A few days after Christmas, the pain in my knee disappeared. I went to my Physical Therapist and she was as amazed as I was by this. She counseled me not to get carried away and start running again just because there was no pain at the moment.

However, a month later, my sister Nicole told me that she was running a half-marathon in May and asked me if I would like to join her. Everything seemed to be screaming at me not to do this, and I was sure that if I said yes that I would just injure myself. But something else in my mind felt perfectly at peace with the idea of doing something difficult with my sister, and I decided to trust that feeling instead of giving into my fear.

For the next three months, I trained hard to prepare for the half-marathon. I tried running on a treadmill, but that felt uncomfortable and awkward, so I mostly rode an exercise bike for nearly an hour each day. Like an ominous harbinger, the pain in my knee began to return when I tried to run, but I simply bought a knee brace and tried not to focus on the pain. I dropped about 15 pounds in the month leading up to the half-marathon, not that I was particularly heavy to begin with, but it felt good to get leaner.

The day of the race came, and I had to wake up at 4:30 a.m. to travel down to Tacoma for the race’s start at 7:30 a.m. I forgot to eat breakfast that morning. I met up with my sister and her family who were there to cheer us on. I noticed one of the runners was dressed like Elvis Presley, with a giant black wig, white jumpsuit and sunglasses. I’m sorry I didn’t get a picture of him.

The first three miles went quite well. I had run many Cross Country races in high school, and so running 3.1-mile races came naturally. However, as the race stretched longer and longer I began to worry. Both of my knees began to hurt, my legs began to burn and I began to wonder if I could finish the race. When I saw the 11-mile mark, I was ready to surrender to oblivion. My strength was fading fast and I was losing hope that the race would ever end. Luckily, my sister Nicole was running next to me and she was able to encourage me to keep going. Seeing her continuing to go strong and hearing her comforting words helped me push through the walls that threatened to keep me from completing the race, and I was able to endure to the end.

Once I triumphantly crossed the finish line, I could barely walk. My knees and legs seemed to stiffen so that they became almost impossible to walk on. I hobbled around for a while with Nicole and her family and then drove home to lie down for the rest of the weekend. I could hardly move on Saturday and Sunday, but the pain gradually lessened and I was able to exercise for 40 minutes on Monday.

Whew! That’s a long story. Now that I’ve let it out, I can see several applications to other aspects of life, and I’ll try to focus on just one.

Long-distance running has appealed to me for many years, as opposed to short-distance sprinting. I like the consistent discipline and prolonged amount of time that goes into long races. You can take little mistakes or problems in stride, while in a short race one mistake can cost you precious tenths of a second that can ultimately lead to your defeat.

Likewise, our success in the real-estate industry is not based upon our short-term sprint to the finish line, but a concerted, long-term effort to grow and perform better each day. Small mistakes along the way can be taken in stride if we have the right perspective and realize that we have miles to go and needn’t sweat the small things along the way.

I was able to push through my fears, limitations and pain to accomplish something I hadn’t thought possible. May we all strive to do the same thing as we face personal and professional challenges.


Editor’s Note:
Robert Lockard is the Public Relations & Media Specialist with LuxuryRealEstate.com. I am Robert. I create all of LuxuryRealEstate.com’s newsletters, write the editorials in LuxuryRealEstate.com Magazine and much more. I hope you enjoy the pictures of me before and during the half-marathon.

By Joey Pauley

This weekend I went snowboarding. I know most of you who are reading this will say “Snowboarding? It’s May. Ski season was over months ago.” But here in the Pacific Northwest, we are blessed to be able to backcountry ski and snowboard all year long. We even have websites for those of us dedicated to make Turns All Year.

I have a split board, a snowboard that splits in two so you can skin up the mountain. It is much better than trying to snowshoe but it has it’s downfalls at times. I have figured out how to cope in powder, but this weekend was my first time out in spring conditions.

I went up with five buddies of which I knew two from teaching backcountry travel courses. The first day was unbelievable. We did a well-traveled tour called the Birthday tour. It was over two passes and some beautiful snow was to be had.

The second day was a whole different story. On the steepest portions of the slope on the way up, I broke right out of the skin track only to careen down the hill losing precious height every time. And this is what I do for fun! I must have done it 25 to 30 times on the way up the hill. My friends were way past me at this point. I was all alone. So what did I do . . . I took even more time. After every step I took a few breaths and figured out what I could do better. I was losing ground but gaining experience in tough times.

By the end of the day I made it to the top of our ski route while my friends went to check out the summit, a few hundred feet higher on poor skiing terrain. I was about an hour behind, but they waited. Very nice.

To make a long story short (I hate it when people say that. It means you are only halfway through) we had an unbelievable ski down. The turns through this area were gorgeous, the snow was just right. I forgot about all my troubles on the way up.

You may ask what this has to do with Luxury Real Estate. I like to take lessons I learn in sports and apply them to other areas of my life and vice-versa. It is a life lesson that we all struggle in hard times. We all struggle, whether it be climbing a mountain in shifting snow or changing our business model and budget during varying economic conditions.

It is going to happen from time to time. Things are not going to go your way. Just assess the situation at every step, make the changes, and rise to the challenge. Soon you will forget about the hard times you endured, but you will always remember the lessons learned.


Editor’s Note:
As a Technical Account Manager with LuxuryRealEstate.com, Joey Pauley helps members with their Web and technology needs. He does a phenomenal job in all of his projects, as you can see by visiting the many websites he has helped design. Mountains are such wonderful for metaphors. They can represent the heights of accomplishment, tests of courage and strength, sites of sacrifice and much more. By pushing forward and learning from our mistakes, we are sure to succeed.

By Jean-Yves Piton

During my recent discussions with many luxury real estate professionals in various foreign countries, talks about increased competition always seem to surface. Clearly, the industry has become more competitive this year than before in most geographic markets, whether such luxury real estate experts are located in regulated markets or not.

At this time, the question to ask is: What is being done to ensure a competitive edge?

Ultimately, the presence of marketing and promotional efforts will be a key differentiating factor. While a certain amount of new business can be generated through an existing portfolio and referrals, top international organizations utilize marketing and promotional initiatives to increase their visibility and brand image globally vis-à-vis competition.

Many organizations unfortunately use promotional efforts to boost sales when revenues are lower than anticipated. That’s a mistake, and these marketing campaigns are often implemented too late! Marketing and promotional efforts should always be used to convey a consistent branding message locally and globally. It’s always a good idea to use effective marketing to set yourself apart from other players and grow sales.


Editor’s Note:
Jean-Yves Piton is the Global Services Membership Manager for LuxuryRealEstate.com. He assists Bente Madtsen, the Director of Global Services, in expanding the LuxuryRealEstate.com brand into even more countries around the world. When times are tough, that’s usually when your hard work and consistent efforts pay off. It’s best to build a shelter before the hurricane comes. It’s too late to prepare when the winds are howling. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t advertise in a tough market, but hopefully you can realize the importance of always maintaining strong marketing tactics, even when it seems like a breeze to buy and sell properties. Keep trying!