Oh crap, more of the same…

I don’t know whether it was misplaced optimism or just raw hope that drove me to believe that 2010 would be different that the very difficult 2009 year that we just competed. I wrote what turned out to be overly optimistic blogs and a newsletter articles about how it was going to be better due to various things like the extended tax credit and pent up demand to go with what I hoped would be a bottoming out and start back on the economic front.

Well, overwhelming evidence to the contrary from a number of prominent economic prognosticators leads me to believe now that we are facing more of the same for 2010. These learned men of the dismal profession opine that the Michigan real estate market is not going to be significantly different than it was in 2010. Crap!

If anything they are now saying that the situation may get a bit worse in the early going, as banks who were forced into foreclosure moratoriums by various states (Michigan being one) take action on delayed foreclosures. There is also a huge hidden inventory of already foreclosed homes that the banks have been holding off the market in hopes of stabilizing values. Those will start hitting the market soon. Then there is the looming commercial real estate crisis; which, while it does not impact my business directly, sets another bad economic tone in an already gloomy economy.

Wow, I’ve written myself into quite a corner here haven’t I? How am I going to get out? Well, I think that is the real issue here. What am I going to do about this mess in which I find myself trapped, through no fault of my own? Am I going to sit in this corner and cry about it? Am I going to give up and just climb into a foxhole until this all blows over, content to muddle along at a survival level. The answer is obvious – NO.

I have no choice but to accept the circumstances of the situation that I find myself in, because none of us can change that; however, all of us can change how we choose to react to that situation, what we do differently to change the outcome that seems inevitable if we do nothing. So that is what I will focus upon in the coming weeks and months. What I need is a plan; and not just a plan of words, but a plan of actions. I have the vision of what I want to achieve, but as Dr. Oz said recently “A vision without a plan is just a hallucination.”

Of this I am certain – if the market stays the same and I stay the same then the results that I should expect will be about the same. That is not acceptable since 2009 was essentially a survival year for me. I sold more houses than ever, but they have dropped so far in value that I made less money than ever. Time for Plan “B”. Plan B will be built on the same base of optimism that Plan A was, just with different approaches to prospecting and perhaps a more organized approach to securing listings in 2010.

I kind of wandered off into Buyer Agent land in 2009, which wasn’t bad and did result in over half of my business for the year; but which also left me with almost no inventory going into 2010 and greatly diminished advertising exposure from signage and MLS listings. Now I have to rebuild an inventory as fast as I can and get back into the swing of holding open houses and doing the other things that lead to long-term success from having listings. I missed out on the REO listings boom, so I need to build my inventory from normal listings, perhaps with a few short sale listing s thrown in because they can’t be avoided these days.

I’ll check back here from time to time to share what things I’m doing differently this year and what worked and didn’t work for me. Please feel free to share your ideas for things to do differently too.