CHANGING TIDES (Part 2)
As the summer is coming to an end, all too soon, there were some awesome times with friends, family, and making new friends. Life is about those memories and experiences. Everyone gets into a routine wake, work, home, sleep is the basics of the day. If you are a kid, you replace work with school. No one remembers all the details of the everyday life.
It is outside of those daily experiences that memories are made and cherished. As I kid some of my best memories are the vacations that we took with family and bringing friends. The basketball camps at Mount St. Marys in Middle School. The summer nights spent at The Farm with my cousins. All great memories.
This summer we had some great experiences that will be lifelong memories.
The alarm goes off at 3:45am groggy and tired with about 5 hours of sleep I go into Alex’s room and get him up, it takes some effort but after about 5 minutes I’m able to get him atleast moving. Anthony, he is a light sleeper and by the time I make it in his room he is getting up and getting ready for the day.
I make a cup of coffee in the Nespresso in the office, a must have this early in the morning. I grab the friend chicken, the subs, the sandwiches for the boys and the snacks and water for everyone in the cooler.
Pulling out of the driveway at 4:15 on July 2nd and heading to the Park ‘n Ride in New Market to meet Coop, Jerry and their kids.
An hour and a half later we are unloading all our supplies for the day on the charter boat, Backdraft, in Tracy’s Landing, Maryland. Today we are going fishing for Rock Fish on the Chesapeake Bay on a charter boat. If you have never been on a charter, there is typically a Captain and a First Mate that work in tandem to make it a successful fishing trip. These two work together daily and are like an old married couple, they each have their roles. The Captain, he is in charge, it is his job to #1 make sure you have a safe trip and #2 to find fish to catch. The First Mate, his job to bait the hooks, teach you how to fish, to throw chum in the water in an attempt to get the fish ‘biting’ so you can catch them. Then at the end he cleans the fish, puts everything away and cleans the boat.
Having kids that hadn’t been fishing on a charter boat before and Coop, Jerry, and myself on the charter apparently fishing for Rock Fish in the bay is different than ‘regular fishing.’ You have to use a ‘circle hook’ instead of a regular hook. The difference being on a regular hook once you feel the fish bite you are supposed to ‘set the hook’ – you’ve seen it when fishing you pull the rod up once you feel a bite. However, with a circle hook, if you do this you just pull the hook out of the fish’s mouth. Now you have to ‘let the fish run’ after the initial bite so it basically ‘sets the hook’ itself.
This took some getting used to but after a bit we figured it out.
During the small talk of getting to the spot where the Captain wanted to fish he and the First Mate were telling us how ‘great’ the fishing had been so far this year that they would ‘limit out’ and be back to the dock by 8a/9a most days so far this summer. (Each person is allowed to catch and keep 2 Rock with a minimum 18”).
We went to the spot that Backdraft had been catching the fish so far this summer and dropped anchor. But I could see the worry on the Captain’s face. On his sonar thing that shows depth, contour of the bottom, and fish (which look like little dark spots) he saw very few dark spots.
Fishing the area for about 45 minutes and not catching a fish, the Captain had to come up with another gameplan.
He started calling other Captains. He leaned on others that were out and tried to figure out what he was doing wrong, but more importantly he needed to find where the fish were that day. Fish, they swim in schools so although the bay is HUGE, the fish they are in these little pockets and you have to find them.
That is why you can be out on the bay fishing and go for miles without seeing anyone anchored up fishing, but then you pop over the horizon and see 15, 20, 30 boats within a one-hundred-yard radius all fishing the same spot.
Cause you have to go where the fish are to catch them otherwise you will leave empty handed.
The Captain had to adjust his original plan as there were no fish biting where they had been for the previous few weeks. He did his research and off we went, another 45-minute boat ride to a potential new spot to fish. We anchored up there around 9:30 where there were only 2 other boats. Within a few minutes we started catching fish. But since we are one of the first one’s on the scene we got one of the ‘good spots’ in the school of fish. And within an hour there were 15-20 other boats all there vying for space because word got out.
Our mate and Captain fished their behinds off for the next few hours and we limited out around 1p. This was a far cry from them limiting out in the first hour of fishing, but with their expertise and guidance they were able to find where the fish were biting and still provide an excellent experience.
A week after this excursion, one of the investors I work with hit me up and asked if I wanted to go on a Charter the end of July.
When I asked him what Charter, he said Back Draft. I told him of my experience and how hard they worked.
Well, the day of the trip… Same thing. Wake up early, drive down to the bay. However this time when we get on the boat there are 9 dudes, the investor was taking his contractors out for a day on the bay thanking them for all their hard work over the past year.
The Captain and Mate this time said that the fish had moved, and we had to go an hour and a half north up past the bay bridge.
Same thing. First spot that we went, the Captain saw a few fish on his sonar. Nothing spectacular but a few. We anchored for an hour and only caught one fish.
He did more research and found out where they were biting, and we had to go ANOTHER half hour up the Bay, but this time there were already 12-15 boats so we didn’t quite get ‘the honey hole’ we got just on the outside of the hole. We were there til 12:30 that day and came within one of the limit. All-in-all it was a good day on the Bay and I met some dudes I didn’t know prior.
On the 2-hour trip back to the Dock I was thinking about the experiences on the 2 Charters and how it relates to Real Estate.
Having been in Real Estate since 2002 I have seen many ebbs and flows in the market and that is one of the great things that I LOVE about what I do, the challenges. What you do for one house, one seller might work in February and then in June the tide has shifted just enough that the value of the home has adjusted.
In August 2005 on the heels of the biggest boom in real estate history where prices were increasing 30% a year the market STOPPED. Showings stopped overnight. Buyers disappeared. Then over the next 3 1/2, 4 years the ‘housing crisis’ hit. Like the Captain of a ship you had to find where the fish were in the market. Investors started buying homes. Short Sales were prevalent. You had to adjust to the changing market. We made it through the housing crisis and then another brisk real estate market since about 2013 has returned to a ‘sellers market.’
See, you can do everything correctly. You can have your documented approach, as we have outlined in our book, ‘The Psychological Approach to Sell Real Estate’ the positions our clients in the best position to maximize profits. You can Scientifically Stage. You can tell the best Property Story. You can have the best Photos. You can find hidden value by making improvements. You can do the best marketing.
Then just like fishing, you do everything correct using the same bait as the weeks before, but you go to your favorite spot and the fish aren’t biting, they’ve moved.
The Captain, the experienced fisherman was able to call on his years of experience to find fish that were biting.
The same thing happened this summer in the Real Estate Market. End of June the buyers had moved. Showings slowed down and the market was not as brisk as it had been for the first half of the year. The first half of the year we would ‘limit out’ in an hour (ie: we couldn’t keep houses on the market and would get contracts within days).
The tide changed and we had to find where the fish were biting. We recently had 2 listings that had been on the market all summer with a showing here. A showing there. A nibble, but no fish in the boat.
Having explained this shift to the sellers, they decided to adjust their price point. To basically pull the anchor in the boat and move to a different location, a different price point to see if there were more fish there.
This move in price found the honey hole of buyers and got contracts on their homes within a week.
When selling a home, like yours, you need to find a Captain that has been there before, that can come up with a strategy to find where the fish are biting, where the potential buyers will find value in your home.