Real Estate and Geocaching

In the past month or so my kids and I have been getting into geocaching here in Victoria. Geocaching is basically a hide and seek treasure hunt using gps devices.  The basic idea is to seek out the caches outdoors and to share your experiences online.  Geocaching.com is essentially the headquarters for this activity and provides a ton of information and a database of geocaches worldwide.  Currently they have almost 1.2 million recorded caches around the world.  

We started by going to the geocaching.com site and looking for caches near our home.  There are 21 within a mile of my house!  So starting out we would write down the co-ordinates and using a free app on my iphone we would go and seek them out.  We found the easy ones and have missed some of the hard ones, though looking back those hard ones aren't so hard anymore as we get better at it and acquire better tools.  First I put the free geocache app on my phone, then I paid for the full service one, then I also paid for an advanced GPS app with neat mapping features as well.  The point being the better tools you have the more fun it is because looking around for a while and not finding something isn't so much fun.

Many caches have little toys or trinkets, which we trade and the kids love.  Some have what are called trackables, which you register online and then rehide as they try to make their way from one destination to another.  Some are on around the world trips.  It is so much fun for all of us.  On trips out of town I'll open the app, search for nearby caches, and bingo, there's four nearby and off we go on a break from whatever it is we were doing.  

I think it's so much fun for me because it's a lot like real estate.  You start looking around trying to find something.  You use online resources.  You upgrade the tools that you use to make your searching more accurate and you get better at it as you learn the market.  Mobile apps for real estate are similar, with mobile listing apps that show you listings within .5 miles or 1 mile or 2 miles.  Looking for a good real estate buy in Victoria is like a game of hide and seek, and sometimes you have to cover a lot of ground to get what you want.  Then when the real estate bug really has you you look at properties everywhere you go.  I know I do.  

Now all I have to do is figure out a way to use geocaching to generate leads and I'll be all set!
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