New Hampshire Real Estate & Consumer Resources

Archive for March, 2006

From what I could gather during my short career, a real estate agents job is all about dealing with hassles. That, of course, may depend on what your definition of hassle is, and I am sure there are some real estate agents who would disagree with my statement.

Here’s what I am trying to say: The likelihood of something going wrong during the course of a real estate transaction is quite high. The very nature of the real estate business and the number of people that must be involved in a transaction create a great many opportunities for things to go wrong.

I heard a few horror stories from fellow agents during my time in the business and was present on more than one occasion when a nervous agent was bustling around the office in the midst of preparing for a closing or some other event related to a transaction.

There are always deadlines that have to be dealt with and a certain number of tasks that must be completed on schedule if you want things to go reasonably well. There is much juggling of schedules involving different people like home inspectors, attorneys, local government employees and contractors.

And here is where I ran into another big problem with a career as a real estate agent. You were so totally dependent on so many other people that had to do their jobs during the course of a transaction.

In other words, all it took was one unreasonable jackass in the mix to create major problems and disrupt the whole carefully-orchestrated chain of events that must be completed in order to keep everyone happy and be certain of a successful transaction.

It is the real estate agent’s job to keep in touch with all these involved parties, make sure everyone knows what they needs to know and make sure that whatever needs to get done actually gets done. Like almost anything in life, difficult or incompetent people will be encountered and they will do their very best to make everyone they deal with miserable.

I must admit to some amount of hesitation when I began to learn about all of these little details of the job while in the company-sponsored training, and in retrospect, I probably should have walked out and called it quits then and there.

However, when one has so successfully deluded oneself to the point of taking a real estate class, getting licensed and being hired to work in a real estate office, it takes a while to return from that particular ‘trip’ and root oneself firmly in reality once again.

Or to put it another way: What in the Hell was I thinking?

A job so fraught with hassle as this one was certainly not for me. Being a pretty independent-minded person, I really hated the idea of being so dependent on others in order for me to do my job.

The idea of spending time on the phone begging this one or that one to change their schedule or do me a special favor was not an appealing one. The little bit of this I actually had to do while working as an agent was not something I wanted to do again.

I was fortunate that I never had occasion to deal with any real morons, and I don’t think the outcome would have been very pleasant if I had, if you know what I mean.

I’m very much the ‘do it myself’ type of person and have difficulty putting myself in a position where I am dependent on someone else ‘ particularly some stranger I don’t know and have never met. This is not a good characteristic for a real estate agent.

It definitely pays to have good negotiation skills if you are planning a career in real estate. That’s pretty obvious when you think about working out deals for your customers, but also realize you have a lot of negotiation to do with other people you must work with as well. I was not blessed with these skills and that was just another nail in the coffin of my real estate career.

Coming Next: Thanks To The People Who Helped Me Decide To Quit

I received yet another e-mail message pumping the GAPJ stock today. That is about the fourth message I have received for this stock in just the last few days. I am wondering if this is a sign of a pump-and-dump scammer that has become desperate to move this stock up so that they or the low-life that hired them can sell off their shares.

The last message I received from them was the same one as the one I had posted below. They just keep changing the day of the week, but all the other nonsense remains the same.

As you can see from the latest chart, this stock does not seem to be doing much, despite their seemingly desperate attempt to pump it up. That’s such a shame.

(Stock chart is from StockCharts.com)

Although they seemed to all but disappear from my e-mail for a while, I am starting to see some new PayPal scams showing up in my e-mail lately.
These low-life crooks are always thinking of new twists to use in their scams to make them appear more realistic. They are still using their old familiar tricks like linking to logos and other authentic graphics on the actual PayPal site and have also added a new trick or two.

In this latest message, you can see how they even provide some authentic-looking information regarding some people in Romania who have supposedly attempted to log in to your PayPal account. I have no idea if what they say about Romania is true since I did not take the time to research it, but it is a clever addition to their bag of tricks.

As always, they want to create a sense of urgency by making you believe someone has been trying to access your PayPal account and although this is certainly enough to get someone’s attention (if they are unfamiliar with these scams), they also add that your account has been disabled and you must access the link they have included if you want to re-activate it.

As always, these links lead to a site created by the crooks to look like the actual PayPal site but is really just a front to capture your PayPal username and password. You can guess what happens next.

Here’s the latest PayPal e-mail scam I received:

One of the duties of real estate agents in our office that I most dreaded was ‘Up Time,’ also known as ‘Floor Time.’ The enthusiastic instructor in my company-provided training even referred to it once as ‘Opportunity Time,’ and that can actually be true if the timing is right.

Up Time, to sum it up briefly, basically involved playing receptionist at the office. Blocks of time were assigned to each agent every month that involved sitting at the office front desk and dealing with potential customers who simply walk into the office or call on the telephone.

These blocks of time were usually three of four hours depending on the shift that was assigned.

Our office ‘ not being what you would call one of the busiest real estate offices in the world ‘ was often pretty quiet. As you might suspect, this can result in some extraordinarily boring shifts on the front desk. Thankfully, there was PC available at the front desk that probably saved my sanity by allowing me to access the Internet and learn more about marketing my web site while I passed the Up Time hours.

I usually ended up with 5 or 6 Up Time assignments each month and that was the norm for all the agents in the office. There was always much trading of Up Time slots as agents had to re-schedule their Up Time because of appointments with clients or family commitments.

Beyond the boredom, I found Up Time unpleasant because I discovered that I did not at all enjoy talking to customers who were calling the office. The vast majority of the time the calls were for other agents in the office which had to be forwarded to the agents extension or to their voicemail. I didn’t enjoy playing receptionist at all. To me it was just a pain in the ass.

I also discovered that I really didn’t even want to talk to the potential customers who called and did not ask to speak with a specific agent. This was the coveted ‘Up Call’ that meant the agent on duty was free to treat the caller as a potential customer and try to get them to set up an appointment or at least give you their phone number.

As with any dealings with the public, some of them were polite and courteous, some of them sounded a bit rude and others sounded just plain annoying or a bit clueless. I was finding out that I did not want to talk to these people. I wanted to pick up that phone and talk to these random voices on the other end of the line about as much as I wanted to slam my fingers in a car door.

Remember, I’m not much of a ‘people person’ and I was starkly reminded of this when I started talking to these people. What I really wanted to do was to tell them to call someone who actually wants to talk to them about whatever real estate needs they happen to have ‘ real or imagined. Yes, some of them did make me wonder.

It was becoming clear to me that my only passion I had for the real estate business was getting as far away from it as I could. I was beginning to realize what a huge mistake I had made and it was more and more obvious to me that this was a job I could never love.

Perhaps more accurately, never tolerate.

I was beginning to wonder how the heck I was going to extract myself from this mess. I kept telling myself it would get better. Much of the anxiety I was experiencing was due to the fact that I felt like I did not have the know-how or experience to do the job when a real live lead presented itself.

I was trying to convince myself that once I got the hang of this job, I would feel a lot better about it and maybe even enjoy it. As I gained a little experience and spent some time working with a few customers, I did become more relaxed and confident but I was also finding out that my tolerance for the job was not trending upward.

The more I learned about the job, the more one glaring fact became evident. This job was just one massive hassle wrapped in a pleasant-sounding name like ‘Real Estate Agent.’

As far as I could tell, that is what a real estate agent’s job is all about: hassle! Having a rather low tolerance for almost any and all hassles that come along in life as a rule, this was another glaring incompatibility between real estate and myself.

Think about it. Have you ever heard of any real estate transaction that ever went completely smoothly with no problems popping up during the course of rhe transaction?

I didn’t think so.

Next: Real Estate Agent or Hassle Hunter?

Imagine my amazement to discover that I had been fortunate enough to receive another fabulous stock tip from esteemed Senior Investment Advisor Estelle Jackson. Can there be any doubt that her word is as good as money in the bank?

But wait! Something here just does not seem quite right. Here is her latest stock pick that she was kind enough to deliver to my e-mail inbox just today:

Yes, something does seem a little strange. I do believe another super-star stock picker had advised me to purchase this very stock not long ago!

Yes! I received an alert for this stock less than two weeks ago here. Although this may come as a surprise to my readers, this very stock, GAPJ, was “Extremely Undervalued” at that time and was given a “short term price target” of $3.75 and was rated a “Strong Buy” with a “300%+ Profit Potential Short Term!”

My goodness, how could this stock go anywhere but up with all it had going for it?

Well, as you can see, when I received the first alert for this stock it was trading for $1.20.

And what do I see on this most recent alert? It is now trading for just $1.04? Don’t dispair! You can see that the current “Projection 12 to 18 Days” is still $3.75!

I suppose, since the stock has done nothing but drop in price in the 12 or so days since their last “short term price target” of $3.75, we can reasonably expect that this baby is ready to take off like a rocket ship to the moon, right?

The sad reality of the situation is that this is exactly what you can expect if you fall for scams like these penny stock alert spam messages.

How do you suppose the investors who fell for that first message (and bought the stock) are feeling now?

Well, here’s a daily chart of GAPJ since the beginning of the month that should give you a good idea (the line that is black and red is the one that represents the stock’s price):

(Above chart from StockCharts.com which is a pretty cool place to get stock charts.)

I think the chart pretty much says it all. Yeah, it’s a real winner for sure!

Oh, and here’s the other peice of penny stock scam-spam I received today. Another winner, you can be sure!

In general, the fact that I am not much of a ‘people person’ was a major contributor to my decision to give up on real estate as a career choice. I was foolish to think I could transform myself into someone who would be happy out working with all types of people, buying and selling real estate.

I did, however, enter into it with my own plan and thought I could do things ‘my way’ and eliminate, or perhaps simply minimize some portions of the job that did not particularly appeal to me.

My company-provided real estate training was very pro-Internet, and that was all well and good since I did have a background working with computers and the Internet. I did not have much experience actually designing and building web sites but I was confident I could pick that up pretty quickly and come up with a reasonably decent real estate site.

I had heard so many positive things about real estate and the Internet from my training and other information I was researching on the Internet that I had become convinced that all I needed to do was put together a decent web site and the business would come to me like magic. You know, ‘build it and they will come.’

Perhaps that would have been the case if I had stuck with it, but at the time I did not realize that it would take a considerable amount of time for my web site to become established and attract any meaningful number of visitors. I had never tried promoting anything on the Internet, so I was completely unfamiliar with side of things.

There were a few visitors to my site each day and I even had an inquiry now and then, although nothing that turned into a bona fide lead. I buried myself in working on my site and kept hoping that I could stick to my plan and avoid the more traditional methods of attracting business like hanging around the office to pick up on walk-ins or some business one of the more experienced agents did not have the time or inclination to deal with.

My intense dislike for office environments kept me away most of the time and I spent time in the office only when I had to. For meetings and my scheduled ‘up time,’ and that was about it. That probably had my manager wondering why she bothered to assign a desk and a phone for me.

As I have mentioned earlier, one of the aspects of a real estate career that attracted me to it was the independence, and a big part of that independence was the option to spend most of my time working at home. After all, with cell phones, pagers, faxes and e-mail, why would one need to spend lots of time in the office? That was my mindset at the time.

I guess I’ll never know if any real success was possible as an ‘Internet Real Estate Agent,’ but I suspect with time, it may have worked out. It isn’t anything that keeps me awake at night since it eventually became clear to me that working as a real estate agent in any capacity was not something I would be happy doing.

Coming Next: Up Time ‘ It Always Got Me Down

The reason I decided to end my real estate career was because it turned out to be a job that I hated. There were many things I hated about it once I got a good feel for what the job was really all about, and having come out of 20+ years of another job I didn’t care for very much, I surely wasn’t too crazy about the idea of becoming trapped in another job that I did not care for.

Initially, it seemed like it would be a pretty “cool” job. You know, get out of bed at 9:00, go show a few houses to some customers, maybe attend a closing and collect a check and be home by 3:00 p.m.

I admit I exaggerate a bit here, but it did seem to me at the time like it could be a fun job, and for many people I suspect it is. Alas, that was not the case for me.

First and foremost, it really helps to be a “people person” in a career like real estate. That’s probably pretty obvious since you must go out and deal with people in order to make any money at all.

As you might have suspected by now, I do not consider myself a “people person.” I should probably try try to expand on that a bit since some of you may be picturing some grouchy old character that should be out in the middle of nowhere living in a run-down shack with no electricity or running water.

That’s not quite the case. However, I am not a person who requires a lot of social interaction. I can be as pleasant and approachable as the next guy, but in most cases I’d just rather be at home doing the things I like to do. That’s a statement a lot of people can probably relate to on the surface, so further explanation is in order.

When I was still working in the high-tech industry there were certain jobs that the company was allowing employees to do from home. It involved providing customer support over the telephone. I had wanted to work from home for as long as I could remember, but not only was the job a bit outside my experience, the idea of doing telephone support all day sounded like a nightmare to me. I had occasions to do phone support during my years on the job and absolutely hated it. I found it very frustrating to be unable to put my hands on something and just fix it and providing instructions over the phone — often to people who did not seem qualified to even sit in front of a computer — was not something I enjoyed doing at all.

There was one fellow I knew who went ahead and decided to go try out the new work-at-home program and was accepted. I was talking one day with one of the other guys that worked in the same department with the fellow that had taken the work-at-home job and we started talking about the program.

I was astonished to hear him say that he would never want a work-at-home job like that because he could not stand being at home all day and that he would feel like he was always at work since his workplace was his home.

To me this was like telling me that you would not want to win the lottery because you could not put up with all that money laying around. His feelings about working at home were the complete opposite of mine. I would have been overjoyed to be given the opportunity to do my job from home and give up that tedious commute every weekday. I thought he was crazy, but in reality he just enjoyed getting away from home and interacting with other people. He is the type of person that needs to get out of his house and feel like he is doing something — a “real” job I suppose you might say.

My feelings could not be any more different. I dreamed of starting my own business and working at home and hoped to make it a reality some day. As I have said, I hate reporting to an office every day, attending meetings and working to put another Mercedes in some CEO’s garage. Been there. Done that. Hated it.
Fortunately for me, circumstances allowed me to leave real estate once I got a good dose of it. Spending so much time working on my real estate web page, I had discovered some opportunities that involved Internet-based businesses that I had known about for a long time but never paid much attention to. That quickly changed and I went to work on something new.
Since the only aspect of my real estate career I was actually enjoying (and wanting to spend all my time on!) was working on my web site, an Internet-based business seemed like a natural fit for me. Around the time I had decided to quit real estate the new business was actually bringing in a fairly steady income and because of that, I felt comfortable walking away from real estate and focusing full-time on my new career — one that I actually loved doing.

These days I work from home 100% of the time and I absolutely love it. I don’t think a day goes by where I don’t think about how fortunate I feel to be able to do this. The idea of spending time in some cubicle or office anytime again makes me cringe. Sure, I spend an awful lot of time here in my home office, but for me it’s a completely different situation. In fact, I devote more of my time to work now than I did when I was in the high tech industry but I still enjoy it.

Coming Next: What Exactly, I Disliked About The Job

One of the things that most surprised me about my new career was how much money I was expected to shell out just to stay in the business. It’s wasn’t a situation where I was kept in the dark and then ambushed with demands for money. I was well informed about the various expenses involved, but I guess it really hit me when I saw the actual amounts involved and started to write checks.

We are not talking a fortune here, but it surely was more than I expect to be laying out to get my career off the ground.

Here are the expenses I had to cover to get my career started (and this comes after the $500 or so I laid out for the pre-exam class, study material and exam fee):

Real Estate Application Fee (State of New Hampshire): $70
Errors and Omissions Insurance (company required): $270
National Association of Realtors Membership (company required): $374
Multiple Listing Service (MLS) Access: $25
Board of Realtors Fees: $55.00

As you can see, I had to spend almost $1300 just to be able to call myself a real estate agent. If it is a career you are planning to start, make sure you have enough money in the bank to cover these costs. Also, you’ll need to cover all your normal living expenses until you start earning money from real estate, and that can take a while. If you are not involved in any transactions for a while, things can get a bit rough.

All the expenditures listed above (except those to do with licensing) are required on a yearly or quarterly basis, so it is a continuing process of writing checks for one membership or another. Eventually I was almost afraid to look in my mailbox each time I visited the office for fear of finding out that I had to shell out another few hundred dollars for some other membership or insurance I was required to have.

For agents that enjoy the work and earning a good income, these expenses are probably not much of a consideration and are well worth the associated costs. And since real estate agents are considered independent contractors in most cases, it is not terribly outside-the-norm to expect some start-up costs when one is esentially starting up a business.

There weren’t exactly mobs of people beating my door down or ringing my phone wanting to buy or sell a house, so seeing money that seemed to be traveling in the wrong direction in relation to my wallet was a little unsettling. That is probably not an uncommon experience for a new agent.

Having attended my first real estate licensing class in May and passed my exam in July. There were options available that could have made it all happen even faster, but I wanted to be able to really absorb the material and not feel rushed. I am not a “cram at the last minute” type of person at all.

I finished the company-provided real estate training in September and started to ease into the actual business of real estate when that was completed, so for me it took about 5 months to go from guy looking for a job to guy who could actually call himself a real estate agent.

There is some debate about whether more training should be required for real estate agents, and now that I am far removed from the situation, I would have to say more training should be required.

I did not feel ready to go out and start helping people buy or sell a home even after completing the company training program. I had excellent support from our office manager and the other agents could not have been better when it came to helping out a new agent, but even so, there seemed to be so much to know that I did not yet know, and I felt totally incapable of actually doing the job.

These feelings stayed with me for a long time — right up until I decided it was time for me to quit the business.

Coming Next: Why A Career In Real Estate Was Not For Me

Before performing any actual real estate duties, new agents with the company were required to complete 4 weeks or so of training (I can’t recall the exact number of weeks, but 4 is close). This is actually a good thing since there is a lot to know about the job and as I mentioned previously, the material that was learned for the licensing exam has very little use in the real world of real estate.

I have heard of small companies that pretty much throw new agents on a desk and tell them to have at it, so I was glad there was some formal training available. I did not have to pay for the training and was a good thing, but there would be other opportunities to open my wallet in the near future.

The training was actually quite good and the primary instructor was a very effective and entertaining fellow. There were also guest instructions brought in to cover subjects like technology, forms (lot’s of paper in this job!) and legal matters. Overall, I would give the training program very high marks and I believe that some type of training program is a must for all new agents.

I felt like a lot of material was coming at me very fast and I was told that was normal. This type of thing is to be expected when taking on a new career, so I did not let it discourage me too much.

There were a pretty good bunch of new agents in the class as well. I’m not a big fan of classroom time, but for the most part, I actually enjoyed much of it. Getting to know some of the other agents a little was also a good experience. I suspect most of them are still working in real estate and did not make the mistake I did (more on that later) by deciding to try my hand at something I should have known was a lousy idea for me.

The only real hassle associated with the class was that it was in a location that was almost 2 hours from my house, so it was a rather long commute for a few weeks. The best thing about the location was that it was just around the corner from this rather off-the-beaten-path little Thai place I found that had some good deals on some very tasty lunch specials. I enjoyed more than one lunch in that establishment during my time in that area.

Another benefit of the training was that it served as a good wake-up call with regard to the realities of the job. I really didn’t have a good understanding of exactly what the job entailed before attending the class, and the more I learned, the more I realized that was not a job that was as easy as it looks.

There was a lot more work involved in being a real estate agent than I had imagined. This in itself was not a problem for me, so it was not like I was going into it looking for a “slacker” job. What attracted me most about the job was the independence. I liked the idea of being more in control of my own destiny and setting my own hours sounded pretty good to me as well!

Although it was a bit of an eye-opener to discover just how many things real estate agents are responsible for during the course of a transaction, it did not dampen my spirits at all at the time. I was still anxious to get out there and get started, despite the fact that I was starting to gain some understanding regarding the enormous amount of hassle that is associated with this job.

When I say “hassle,” I mean it in a way that is very specific to my personality. What I consider hassle might be considered a minor inconvenience by someone else. The fact that there are indeed many real estate agents out there doing this job every day strongly suggests that a lot of people don’t feel the same way I do and think it is a great job.

Although real estate was not something I ended up enjoying, I don’t want to provide a bleak picture to someone who may be considering a career in real estate. Personally, I hated it and found it to be incredibly boring. However, I worked with other agents who often talked about how much they loved the job and could not imagine themselves doing anything else.

I may sound negative regarding my experience with real estate but please realize that it was just my experience, and unless you are a lot like me, you might find that a career in real estate would be something you would enjoy a great deal.

In a future article, I will do my best to come at this whole real estate thing from a personality perspective and talk a little bit about my personality and why it was not a good match for someone who is intending to start a career as a real estate agent.

Coming Next: Excuse me? How Much Was That Again?

The crap keeps coming in. Instead of posting the entire e-mail messages with all the associated nonsense paragraphs (to fool the spam filters) I am just posing the images that arrived as the real “meat” of these spam-scam penny stock messages.

This first one is a real winner. It is concerning a stock called CWTD (China World Trade Corp.) and this is the classic pump and dump e-mail that does not even include the legal disclaimers that are required by law. It’s full of the typical hype like “ready to rock” and “rapid growth” and is even signed by a “Senior Investment Advisor.” Talk about laying it on thick!

At least the senders of this next one took the time to print a disclaimer at the bottom of the message. Too bad they used a font that is just too small to read. Even so, it looks like a bit less than the full disclaimer that shows up on this kind of thing when it shows up in the U.S. Mail. If I weren’t such a trusting person, I might suspect that that have something to hide.

As always, PLLN (Peopleline) could be a great company that will grow like crazy and make investors a fortune, but that’s not what these messages are all about. The single purpose of these messages is to get people to buy up this stock and drive the price up as a consequence so the slimeballs behind these messages can dump the shares they have owned for a while and make themselves a fortune.

You can be sure this is sound financial advice since, as you can see,?? they close the message with “Go PLLN.”