The desire to work

Wanting to be productive in society is part of the nature of most of us. I have grown up with people who keep being productive long after they have supposedly retired. In these challenging times, it is often no longer an option but a necessity for many people.

I have always enjoyed working with people and trying to help people achieve their dreams. Usually if I could help someone get closer to their dream, it ended up being financially rewarding. Sometimes in companies politics get in the way, and it is hard to find win-win situations, but being customer focused has almost always helped.

I am proud that working hard is part of my nature. I have spent the last three years trying to be the best real estate agent that I could possibly be. I have become an expert at helping people find the right kind of property near water on the NC coast. I have written countless articles and viewed literally hundreds of homes. I have become a boater who enjoys the local waters, and it has helped me to really understand the needs of my clients and also catch my fair of fish.

I have built a substantial Internet presence which starts with my Southern Outer Banks site, includes my Crystal Coast site, and a site designed to be an electronic town square. Of course I have a real estate site and a few more Internet presences including Crystal Coast Living, a blog which I am paid to write.

A lot of what I have done is area promotion. I have done travel guides for several spots including Emerald Isle and Beaufort. Through my writing and Internet sites with lots of pictures and area information, I have tried to make it easy for people to decide if the Crystal Coast of NC is the right place for them. Many people have written to thank me for all the information.

On top of that I have been successful in attracting people to the area. Some have packed up and moved without even seeing the area other than through my eyes. Others have come and found that what I have written and shown with my photos is a reality that is appealing to them. Unfortunately with the challenging real estate environment, a number of people who have wanted to make the move have been unable to do so.

My three years at real estate have proved to be a great learning experience, and I recently paid my dues for another year. However, with the continuing inactivity in the market, I am beginning to look for something to keep me busy until this real estate slump ends.

I love technology, photography, and writing. I am not sure what the order of my passions should be other than I am determined to keep family first. Real estate today is tremendously high tech which is one of the reasons I enjoy it. The amount of information that can be provided to a client is truly amazing.

Finding new ways to help people learn an area from a distance has intrigued me for a long time. I have recently starting using GPS and trip mapping of photos to help with the process. This trip from Bluewater Cove to Swansboro and Emerald is a good example. By taking the 3D view, you end up flying along in Google Earth with added pictures that I have taken.

Sometimes it possible to innovate your way out of a slump, but real estate has contracted so much that even many of the very established players are finding it difficult to survive much less innovate.

As I move forward in the next year, I expect to work hard. It will be interesting to see if real estate ends up recovering enough to eat up my time, or if I find another challenge which might be more rewarding and could possibly steal me from real estate.

As always time will tell the story, and the journey will be a substantial part of the reward. I can also count on the beach still being there when I need it.

That fall feeling

As the season begins to turn here on the coast, my thoughts are drawn back to previous falls. There are some great memories there.

One fall, probably 1974, I built the first big barn on our farm in Tay Creek, New Brunswick. I can still remember nailing up the last of the steel siding just before American Thanksgiving.

By then it was pretty cold to work outside without gloves.

In the fall of 1981 we had our cattle dispersal sale. In one afternoon we sold all two hundred head of our purebred Angus cattle. Some went as far away as Alberta. It was an amazing event that I will never forget.

About a year later I went to work in one of the first retail computer stores in eastern Canada. The transition from working outside all the time to a desk job was easier than I thought. It is a wonder that we have any farmers. Still in less than a year, I had helped open four other stores and had a number of employees working for me.

When the fall of 1984 rolled around, I joined Apple Computer for an amazing journey of almost twenty years. For those years, fall always meant a sales conference which in the later years was usually in the California. The early years were wild for a guy used to life on the farm..

At the end of one early conference in Boca Raton Starship played for us. Then there was the greased watermelon hunt with Michael Spindler on a beach that I cannot even remember.

The year 2004 brought the first fall after leaving Apple. It was a time of soul searching and trying to figure out what to do next with my life.

I ended up doing a couple of years with small companies, but I found that for the most part the only way that young companies learn is through their own mistakes. I actually time to relive corporate mistakes that I have already seen would be wasted.

Then in the fall of 2006 after lots of training I passed my real estate licensing exam for the state of North Carolina. I felt a great sense of accomplishment because I had not been certain that I could go back to school. Old computer guys can learn new tricks. The rest of that fall was spent taking even more real estate classes.

We also moved down to the coast of North Carolina in the fall of 2006. It was a risky dream of mine, but I am glad we did it. I have learned a tremendous amount and met some great people.

Fall of 2007 was a relatively successful real estate time for me. I finished the year strong and was named rookie of the year by our firm. We were actually well on the way to have a good follow-up year until the financial world fell apart this fall.

I think this fall might be remembered as my first fall of serious fishing. Last fall I was learning out to handle our boat, this year I am more focused on fishing.

There have been many pleasant days on the river and along the beach. The weather has been great, and we have caught enough fish to enjoy a few meals and to keep us excited about fishing.

Fall is always when I start to take stock of where I am and what I want to accomplish next.

Real estate continues to suffer, but at some point I know it will recover.  I am not sure that I will hang on those many years.  There are a lot of factors are going to make it a very tough place to make a living. I have my eyes open for other opportunities.

I continue to believe that the Internet will play an ever increasing role in helping people find and sell their homes. My skill set makes me well positioned to take advantage of the Internet as a marketing tool but it might be for something besides real estate.

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Update- 2014

While I am still a licensed real estate agent, I stopped actively listing properties in the fall of 2011.  I have published several books and gone back to my roots in technology.  I am now vice president of sales and marketing for WideOpen Networks.  I still managed to keep up a very active writing career on the Internet.  There are lots of links and updated information on my homepage.

Using "Dip" thinking to review decisions

It is always easier to be the quarterback after the plays have been run.

Still once in a while it makes sense to evaluate what has happened and the context surrounding major events.

I like to do it because it helps me learn from my mistakes and successes and the ones of others. I have never been ashamed of learning from others, either what to do or what not to do.

One of the big turning points in my life started in the summer of 2003 when I was director of federal sales for Apple. My team had been on a tear. We had grown sales massively in the very tough federal market. We had done it with very few resources and lots of hard, smart work.

Yet it had been like pulling teeth. We seemed to be taking Apple into a market which the company really did not want. It was hard to get Apple to even acknowledge that a federal team existed.

It was then that I learned once again that you should always be careful what you wish for, because you might get it.

August of 2003, Apple appointed an enterprise VP. It was actually the beginning of the end of my career at Apple though I did not know it at the time.

Our efforts at selling to the federal government had flourished as a skunk works but was about to die from the company trying to help us.

I have pondered how this could have been played differently. After all I had been successful through nearly twenty years in Apple's very challenging sales environment.

The reality was that I should have left Apple at the moment that Apple half-heartedly tried to help the enterprise effort with a vice president who was not only toxic but clueless to the point of embarrassing us in front of key customers.

I recently read the post, The Big Dip: Ten Questions with Seth Godin. It provides an interesting framework for figuring out why my efforts at hanging in there at Apple during a tough time was exactly the wrong decision.

It’s time to quit when you secretly realize you’ve been settling for mediocrity all along. It’s time to quit when the things you’re measuring aren’t improving, and you can’t find anything better to measure...

I knew in the summer of 2003 that our numbers were not going to match what the company wanted. The biggest reason was the shortage of G5 systems during the critical buying season.

However, there were a number of other reasons, and most of them were related to settling for mediocre support from Apple when trying to achieve our goals.

We were promised key executives who would regularly visit Washington. It never happened. We ended up with an Oracle retread who could not have sold half priced new Mac products at MacWorld.

Apple promised us that we would be on the GSA Schedule, but ended up changing their mind and delaying it until years after I left Apple.

We were told that we would get publicity and interviews in federal trade papers. What we got was near invisibility in the world's largest IT market.

I could go down a whole list of promises made and broken by the corporation when it came to the federal market, but the truth is that Apple had no intention of really pushing their products in the federal market. We were living a pipe dream.

In my mind I knew that sales would improve in 2004 because we would have product again, but what I did not understand is that Apple's commitment to the market would never improve.

My mistake was using sales growth as a measurement. What I should have been watching was the company's delivery on its promises which turned out to be abysmal.

The "Dip" in 2003 was actually something that I should have realized as a signal to get out of Apple. I did not see it, and I wasted ten months when I could have been doing something else instead of being a target.

I encountered another "Dip" in late spring of May 2006.

I eventually got put into one of those situations where I had little to do in spite of being a VP. I could have worked at hanging around and trying to find a way to contribute, but who wants to work where their skills are not appreciated and their efforts are not acknowledged? I certainly had no interest in doing that, so I left.

The theory of the "Dip" has been a good way to understand when to continue fighting and when to move on to another set of challenges.

Selling the beach

No matter where I have lived, I have convinced myself that my particular spot is one of the greatest on earth.

Perhaps that is human nature. Still I like to think that I have lived in some gorgeous spots from Nova Scotia to Roanoke, Virginia.

We now live near the beaches of Emerald Isle, NC. It is pretty hard to deny its beauty. A couple of photos that I have taken in the area are among my all time favorites.

The first, Morning Waters, was a sunrise taken from the beach. The second, The End, was taken looking from Emerald Isle across Bogue Sound.

Since living in the area is almost as nice as the Southern Outer Banks pictures are beautiful, it isn't too much of a jump to selling property in the area as a Realtor®.

I really think this is a great area to live. It is easy to sell something you believe in unless you are trying to do it on city-data forum and you have anything to do with real estate.

I started blogging in late 2004 and have a tremendous number of posts about areas and things that have absolutely nothing to do with selling real estate.

While my Realtor® site and my ActiveRain site are definitely about selling real estate, it is really hard to argue that the first page of my Southern Outer Banks site has much to do with selling property. I might be promoting an area, but I am not doing much selling real estate or talking about my services as a Realtor® on a page with steamed crabs.

Today I got banned again from city-data forum for linking to my current Southern Outer Banks site and its Crab Feast article.

At the same time city-data forum is full of Google real estate ads. I am pretty sure that the city data forum folks have a special deal with Google to serve up members of the forum only to Google's paying customers.

I was very careful not to link to my Realtor® site while posting at city data forum and as you can expect I wasn't doing a whole of lots of selling my services as a real estate agent on a post about fried clams.

I may spend a lot of effort selling the area we live in, but that is not the same as being a real estate agent. City data forum must be making so much money for Google placements that they can't afford to have the chance that any forum members might wander across agents other than the ones that advertise on Google.

My latest site is about restaurants on the Crystal Coast. My guess is that the monitors at City Data forum would classify it as real estate site.

What I miss on the coast

There is not much that I miss on the coast or I would not be creating websites with titles like "Coastal Paradise."

I do miss some of the unbelievable lush green colors that we see in mountain valleys of Virginia.

It is the closest green that I have seen to that of summertime in Nova Scotia and the Canadian Maritimes which I believe are the greenest spots on earth.

Even trips to New Zealand and Ireland with their fabled green have not persuaded me to back down.

The beaches of Emerald Isle in North Carolina cannot hold a candle to the green of the mountains this time of year. Of course, they have other attractions that keep me happy most of the time.

At the coast I also miss the hundreds of beautiful Irises that adorn many of the garden's in the interior of North Carolina and Virginia.

In New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, the Irises would grow in the damp spots in the pastures.

We have lots of beauty on the coast, so I guess it is only fair that we save some of nature's spectacular decorations for the hills and mountains.

I had hoped to have more regular posts here at Ocracoke Waves, but I have been doing some all-consuming web work that has slowed me down.

My CoastalNC.org site and my Coastal Real Estate site have been completely redone after many hours of work.

My goal was to create a better user experience and make the information easier to find.

You can see some of the results of my work in the clickable buttons to my sites that are now in this blog's side panel.

I would love to hear any feedback. You can click here to email comments to me.

I have also started a real estate newsletter about coastal property which I will t try to do once a quarter, The first one is available for viewing and if you would like to subscribe, this link will get you to the form.

I have also chosen the Reston Backfence Online community for my first online ad. I will be interested to see what the response is.

Contemplating cosmic changes in real estate

I made the decision to become a Realtor® last July. As in any life changing decision, there were a number of factors. I wanted to be in an industry that valued individual contribution. Working with people where I could develop a relationship was also important to me.

My vision of real estate came from my own experience of receiving dedicated personal service when buying and selling houses over the years. While I found houses of interest on the Internet when we did our last purchase, we ended up buying one that we had never seen on a computer. A great local agent at Bluewater GMAC Real Estate in Cape Carteret, NC found us just the right spot after showing us plenty of places we couldn't see digitally.

Now as I am coming up to speed as a Realtor® here on the Southern Outer Banks of North Carolina (SOBX), I find that there is a huge push for real estate brokers to embrace the Internet. It is true that more and more customers are doing their initial searches on the Internet. The younger the people, the more likely they are to depend on some Internet help at first.

I believe that the Internet can add value to real estate transaction. I am a huge believer in technology used properly. However, I think people who believe that the Internet is going to drive all the costs out real transaction are misleading themselves or others whom they're trying to capture as customers. Adding technology to real estate purchases is not going to be the same as pay at the pump, ATM, or self checkout at the grocery store. Technology hasn't driven down our banking, grocery, or gasoline costs.

Buying real estate is also not like buying a car. While the Internet helps intelligent car purchasers save some money, it hasn't help much with my service costs at the local dealership.

Real estate is still a local market unless you just don't care where you live. Buying a home is far more complicated than any other purchase and comes with lots of potential pitfalls. The reason many people think that real estate transactions are easy is that they have been fortunate to have had some very good real estate brokers working with them. The number of things that can go wrong in a real estate transaction are amazing. Having nearly 24X7 human help during this process can protect the largest investment that you will likely ever make in your lifetime.

While the Internet can truly help, it is still important to have trained professionals doing a great job for each client who wants to find the right place to invest money in real estate, whether it is the perfect place for a second home, or the right spot for a great retirement home. There is no getting away from real estate requiring lots of shoe leather hitting the pavement or in our case lots of sandals on the sand.

While the real estate business is going to change dramatically just as many others have, it's not going to change to the point where working with quality professionals isn't important.

A post on one of my other blogs deals with an article which hinted that real estate professionals are on their way out because they don't add value equal to the commission that they charge. The post, "Old school at times and proud of it," is a detailed commentary on the subject and explains many of the complexities of the subject.

In this market, I think most sellers will find that a great Realtor® is worth every penny they charge.

While it may be very easy to buy a property right now, buying it and buying it right are two different things. Selling homes today requires all the professional help you can afford.

Our technological infirmity

Today it's possible to buy some amazing technology for very little. Look at flash drives which can haul around digital music, pictures, and documents. For the most part you plug them into your computer and copy information to and from them. I recently saw that you could buy Turbo Tax on a flash drive.

The unfortunate thing is that most technology isn't like a flash drive. I have some wonderful ink jet printers. They produce pictures with quality as stunning as is possible to transfer to paper or canvas. Well at least they do that when the stars are aligned, and I am holding my mouth at the correct angle.

Last night I was trying to print a few real estate listings from the Multi-Listing Service. My printer burped. The output from the printer which had been perfect all day, turned nearly unreadable. I tried cleaning the printer nozzles. That didn't work. I tried my wife's prescription when faced with malfeasance from any of our electronic devices. I turned it off and decided to let it rest overnight.

I even waited until after lunch before facing the printer once again. In a couple of hours of working with all my tricks I managed to get things back on track. Most people would have given up or thrown the printer over the cliff.

It occurred to me after this battle of humans and technology that we have reached the point that we can afford more technology than we can understand. It used to be that technology was expensive and came with people who understood how to make it work.

When something didn't work, we could call someone who might be able to explain why it didn't work.

Today technology is so inexpensive that there are very few people involved except the people who don't know out to make it work once they have purchased it.

Certainly the people selling most of the technology don't understand it. I wrote about the mostly clueless technology sales force when I faced the challenge of buying a new fax, printer, scanner, and copy machine which is more popularly known as an "AIO" device.

These are wonderful devices which cost very little considering how much they do when they are actually working. I wrote a couple of posts about my experiences getting a home office going with my AIO, a laser printer, a Mac computer, and a Windows/Linux computer. The first post, "HP AIO Photosmart C6180 and Mac OSX," and the second one, "The not so reluctant home system engineer," have some enlightening comments. Some very intelligent people, even with the help of some supposed experts, can't get all the features of these AIO devices to reliably work.

Printers aren't the only problems. I recently went out looking for a wide angle camera to take pictures of homes for my new career as a Realtor® in what I like to call my coastal North Carolina paradise. I wasn't surprised that once I got outside of a photo store, few people even understood what I was asking. In fact even in the photo store I probably knew as much about wide angle digital cameras as the sales people.

I guess the lesson is that it isn't too hard to buy more technology than you can use or at least keep working reliably. With wireless networks, cell phones that can do almost anything, and $1,200 laptops that can even do video conferencing along with the rest of modern computer tasks, we are awash in technology.

Now if we just had some people who understood how all of it works. At least I have some great photographs that I have managed to keep on the web. The one thing that works almost all the time is my Firefox browser, and for that I've glad. I even heard that Microsoft is backing off in features in their Office Products.

Perhaps we are at the technological peak, and we can hope that things will get easier and more reliable instead of getting more and more complex.

The challenge that all businesses face

I just wrote a post, "The real challenge for Apple & OS X." In it I talk about how it isn't good enough for Apple to be just "better" than the new Windows version, Vista.

In order to just hold their own, Apple must be geometrically better than Windows offerings. This is no different than the scenario faced by many other businesses that do not hold the dominant position in their market. It's even the case for local businesses. If you are the new guy in town, just being "better" is not enough.

The question boils down to how do you show enough real value to a customer in order to convince them to give you a fair shot at their business. In the computer business, it is really hard, because staying where you are is often easier than doing something different. Change can be tough.

When I helped to sell email services, often the key differentiator was just being there when the customer called and being able to jump through whatever hoops needed to solve their problems. Most often that meant having enough well trained people to answers their questions and guide them through the initial sign-up procedures. Surprisingly we had a few people who thought Saturday or Sunday would be good days to switch email providers. That meant some Saturday afternoons doing coverage like I wrote about in "The Saturday afternoon technologist, electronic hair."

The real estate world which I've recently joined has long been accustomed to working Saturday and Sunday afternoon if necessary. If we aren't around to catch the customers when they walk into the door, someone else will be.

Even companies like Apple that are product focused really need to keep their customer facing side as effective as possible. Just having stores where people can meet with dedicated and knowledgeable Apple people has been a huge success for Apple. Still as it is with all large companies, finding the right person or the right answer can be challenging. When I was at Apple, at least once a month some poor lost soul would finally get routed to my desk after a month long decent into phone tree hell while looking for someone at Apple Federal.

The other key to responding to customers is actually listening to them. In the last three years I've had a fair amount of experience with real estate agents. I also been hauled to a large number of houses that the minute I saw them, I knew we were wasting our time and the time of real estate agents. The agents had not listened to me or they would have figured out that I wanted a house with some beach characteristics instead of a two story colonial.

I'm really curious to see how Apple does with the iPhone. Apple is of the belief that you have to tell customers what to buy instead of building products with the help of customers. That's one of the main reasons Apple products seem to be headed more towards a closed ecosystem. If you aren't trying to make your products work with your customers' stuff, my guess is that it won't.

In real estate we have to listen to our customers who often become our clients. Once they become clients, we have to put their interests before ours.

It's a totally different relationship than you find in the computer world. There companies buying products have been known to be stuck with equipment made obsolete by an announcement of new products. Sometimes it happens before the purchased products even make it to someone's desk.

Of course that doesn't make for happy customers.

It turns out that the best way to get another customer is to do a really good job for the one that you already have. Happy customers can be very effective sales people for a company

In Apple's case the customers have gone that one step further and in effect become tremendous evangelists for the company. Should Apple ever lose that army of Mac users, it would be very hard to continue to be successful.

I'm actually glad to be in a world where my success is measured by how successful I am in meeting the customer needs not just today but over time. If more companies measured their employees that way, we would see more companies responsive to customers and fewer ones who just throw their products over the wall with the hopes that someone will purchase them.

Incremental improvement to meet customer suggestions might not be the best way to define new product categories, but it is a great way to build customer loyalty even if you aren't the biggest player in town or the market.