It's been more than a month since my last post. There's reason for this: I've been on vacation! That's what people do in the summer, right?
Well, residential real estate and time off is, for lack of a more creative metaphor, like oil and water. It ain't no Bayou Breeze! Choosing to be a residential Realtor means subjecting your time to the mercy of your clients' time, or other Realtors' clients' time. Just when you were about to walk out the door to go for a jog in the park, you have a showing on your listing in 30 minutes. Or, just when you've settled onto the couch to decompress and watch a movie after a long day, you get a call that an offer on your listing is awaiting you in your email inbox. This is something that, hopefully, with time, I'll be able to manage better. But it makes taking a vacation really hard.
I did it though! No complaints. Two and a half weeks across the pond whiling away the hot Houston summer on a continent I'd never stepped foot on before: Africa.
But what with Blackberries, iPhones and the Internet, you can't escape knowing what is going on back home. It's almost impossible not to be connected. You have to try to not be.
My sweet husband Chad cherry-picked two chapters of Tim Ferriss' 4-Hour Work Week for me to read, one of which was "The Low-Information Diet," which actually teaches you how to disconnect. But it's a real struggle.
"Let me just see if I can get a connection here in the middle of the Serengeti in Tanzania...wa-la!" The best signal of the vacation. I knew that if I wasn't able to disconnect there, I had a problem. But, hey, I haven't finished the book yet...?
"We found a home," my client of a year and a half says via email.
It's Murphy's Law. Not that his finding a house was a bad thing, it's just that I wanted to be there when he found it. It happens to all of us Realtors, so I am learning. What's the fastest way to get your listing sold? Go on vacation!
I am fortunate to have my mother as my working partner, a true shepherd for me in learning the business, not to mention garnering clients. But the mother-daughter business relationship fails when you and your mother go on the same vacation.
It worked out, thanks to some of my colleagues at John Daugherty, Realtors. I am grateful and indebted to them for their willingness to help cover my business while I was away enjoying those green hills.
Two interesting things--among a hundred--that I learned on my vacation:
- Even Maasai have cell phones.
- Even Maasai aren't afraid to take calls in the middle of a ceremonial dance.
It's a testament to technology, I guess. A little sad, but an unstoppable force.
At this one amazing lodge where we stayed in Kenya, there was an Ernest Hemingway quote painted on the wall. "All I wanted to do now was to get back to Africa. We had not left it, yet, but when I would wake in the night I would lie, listening, homesick for it already." Lovely, as was the whole vacation. But now it's back to business.
