Ok, so here I sit trying to write my first blog. I'm wrestling with where and how to begin. I used to write as a freelancer and as a stringer reporter for a local newspaper, but that was years ago. How do I write a blog??? Do I talk about myself or my business, or throw out a bunch of stats about the real estate market...Uggghh. What am I doing here??? I'm a bit lost.

I've signed up on ActiveRain 'cause my web-savvy better half tells me it's what I should have done long ago.  I remember a time when I was the proactive one. I was the eager-beaver newbie agent 4 years ago who couldn't get enough of all things real estate. I lived on-line. Falling asleep at my desk on my keyboard was a nightly event in those days. My husband was so jealous of the amount of time real estate took from him that the arguments were weekly events. But he tolerated it because he saw how I took to it and how alive it made me.  I would go online and join this group or research that opportunity, and ask him to investigate this and that for me because I was soon too busy selling homes and helping families...boy, those were the days.  Did ya ever notice that the busier you are, the busier you get and conversely, when there's a lull (like now in this buyer's market), when you actually have more time to spend on research and infrastructure-building, that all you wanna do is curl up on the couch and watch HGTV?  Or take a vacation? I feel like I've been on a buyer's market-induced vacation for about a year now.  No matter how hard I try to get back on top, consistent success seems to elude me. But I digress.

My husband Ray says that in my first post I should tell you a little about me, so here goes.  I've been a REALTOR in residential sales for 4 years. But thanks to my dad and my grandfather, (both now passed on) I've had real estate in the blood since I was a little girl.  I fondly remember tagging along with the two of them as they purchased, rehabbed and flipped homes or rented them in Camden, NJ in the 70's and early 80's.  I was a first-class tool-passer... you know, as in, "Kimmie, pass me that hammer."  That was my weekend and summer job (that is until I became a boy-obsessed teen). But I so loved that smell of sawdust and the cacophony of hammers, drills and saws, and the art of taking an old shell of a house and breathing life into it to make it a home again.  I thought they were gods.  I also remember the ouch of my first tetanus shot after a losing battle with a rusty nail that ended up in my foot. Good times!  

Later, after Grandpop and then Pop died, I helped my grandmother manage the properties. As she got older, I helped her sell them off to local business acquaintances and friends after she was no longer able to deal with being a landlord.  I guess I was always meant to be a Realtor.

Anyway, for my formal foray into real estate, after researching most of the Big Guy chains I decided to sign up with a RE/MAX agency in the Merchantville & Pennsauken, NJ area. Although I wasn't living there at the time, it was near the area where I grew up and I knew the territory.  I liked the RE/MAX model and found a RE/MAX broker who was willing to take a chance on a newbie who had a background in publishing and in contract negotiations in the music business and who thought she'd hold her own.   We were both right.  I hit the ground running. 

After my first six months in real estate I reached RE/MAX's respectable "Executive Club".  Although, didn't most Realtors succeed then? It was 2004, after all,  - Boom Times!  I reached the Executive level after working just 6 months in that first year.  Soon my real estate widower husband decided that if he couldn't beat it, he'd join me.  He spent hours, days and months getting my site to place higher and higher in search engines, and with eager referrals from almost every single client I'd helped,  I had a stellar 2005.  I reached the revered RE/MAX 100 percent Club for that year.  It was heady! 2005 was a blurr of transaction after transaction, helping family after family and -most rewarding - many of them were first-time buyers. I even helped many of my own family members at the time.  Ray decided to get his real estate license to help part-time, with all the business that was coming my way. 

Life was good.  I was in a groove and my husband had come along for the ride!

We rolled into early 2006 without a care in the world.  We planned our work and worked our plan.  Ray was newly licensed and while training him added some pressure, he was able to do buyer tours and work on the website, etc.  That freed me up to network and set goals and look at advertising options, and to generally work at a higher level.  But all along, in the background, there was the murmer of bubble-bursting talk in offices and coffee shops and in the media. There were professional distractions as well.  An office move  slowed us down a little.  We decided to leave the Pennsauken RE/MAX office for one in Voorhees, NJ. It was a multi-office franchise and we thought that flexibility to work in many communities would help us to grow.  That brought us to mid-2006.  By then, that incessant murmer of bubble-bursting talk began to crescendo into a roar and, lo and behold, by late 2006 we began to see that the rumors had teeth -despite NAR's bright-side leaning rhetoric.  Yes, 2006 was still to be considered a good year, but for me, it was down by 10 percent from 2005. Although I still made RE/MAX's 100 Percent club, it was a little more difficult to do.    

I felt my Groove beginning to waver a little.

Then came 2007.  I started the year determined not to allow the by-then decided buyer's market get me down.  I was pumped because I was taking the real estate broker's pre-licensing courses in preparation for my Broker's Licensing exam.  I wasn't gonna let the rhetoric and nay-sayers get me down.  I was not going to be one of those who went out and got a "real job".  (We all know that most people don't consider real estate a real job. Right? We're just over-privledged soccer moms with too much time on our hands, goes the conventional wisdom. But that's a whole other blog.) 

I figured since 2007 was starting slower, in terms of sales, it would be a good time to enhance my education and skills level, work on my website with my husband and really begin to look at and take advantage of Web 2.0 tools,etc.  But what's that they say about the best laid plans?   Mine were soon derailed by a family tragedy.  My beautiful 23-year old niece, Eboni, so sweet and kind and full of life, passed away in April of 2007.  She suffered a fatal heart arrythmia brought on by an undiagnosed episode of acute myocarditis (inflammation of the heart).  It was a total and utter shock.  She'd just been at my home for our  Easter celebration with her new boyfriend - the first one whom she'd ever been serious enough about to introduce at one of our large family dinners.  She played all the kiddie games and was the big hog in the Easter egg Hunt - finding more eggs than anyone else! We teased her all day about her unwillingness to grow up.  That's what we all loved about her -- she was just the biggest kid, with the biggest smile you'd ever seen.   A week later she passed out and died just as Ray and I arrived at the hospital.  She was wearing her Care Bears cartoon flannel pajamas.  Always a big kid, that Eboni.  God I loved her so.  Her mother, my sister, was away in Florida, so I had to break the news to her.  It was an excrutiatingly painful event in our big fat loving family of 8 brothers and sisters and 20+ nieces and nephews.  We'd never experienced the untimely death of a loved one so young and vibrant.  We were all just too devastated for words.

My life-force, let alone my groove, was now ebbing away.

I summoned up the strength to complete my educational requirements at the end of April '07 and I passed all the class tests, but I never took the Broker's Licensing exam  that year...I was in a funk for most of 2007.  I eeked out a living --barely - -because I had to.  I was back down to Executive Club - missed 100 percent by only 1 transaction - that deal last summer wherein my client was self-employed and pre-approved when we began to look at homes in June, but whose loan program was pulled by late August, right when he found a home he loved.  We couldn't get his loan done anywhere...the harbinger of things to come.  It's been that way ever since. 

I'm sure I don't have to recount to you guys the stories of pulled loan pre-approvals, tightened credit, rising inventory, escalating days-on-market, non-committal buyers, and the news media that won't give us a break. That was the story that began in 2007; and this year we've added to all of that, the saga of rising REO listings and the trials that go with them, a glut of listings that turn out to be pre-foreclosures, and loss mitigation negotiations with banks that say they don't want to own these properties but who then tie you up in the quagmire of their bureaucracies for 3-6 months or more while you lose buyer after buyer, all the while you pray every day that you'll be able to help this family that's losing their life as they knew it.  Oh, and you get to do all this for maybe half of the commission the seller agreed to on the listing agreement because the bank doesn't think much of you, even though you're solving their problems.  After all, you do this for fun, right?  You don't have children to feed and clothe or a mortgage of your own to pay....do you?  

My groove has left the building.

But I'm determined I'm gonna find that darned groove again if it's the last thing I do.  As I started to come back from my depression over my niece's death,  I remembered that she was so proud of what I'd accomplished so quickly in real estate.  I know that she'd want me to keep growing in it and expanding.  She'd never want me to give up.  So I gotta keep moving forward. 

Things are beginning to look up.  I took my Broker's exam early this year and passed it first time at bat!  According to NAR, this is still set to be the 5th best year ever in real estate transactions, on track for 5 million+ home sales. I know, they can be polyanna-ish, but I gotta believe that I can get some of those sales!  After all, this is what I signed up for.  As Realtors, we will face up markets and down markets and there's people to help and a living to be made in either.  You just have to decide to do it.  I know that I can find that spark that I had in the beginning and get back on track helping families and who knows, maybe even heal myself in the process.