About This Blog

Purpose Of This Blog.

Our friend Dan Wyatt once said that there are three questions every person through all phases of life must ask himself:  “Who am I? Why am I here? And am I coming or am I going?”

We decided to put down our purpose so you’ll better understand who we are and why we do what we do. Furthermore, if we disappoint you in some regard, our purpose may explain why we don’t do some of the things we don’t.

This blog was created to help you better understand the Reno-Sparks real estate market: thereby assisting you in making, perhaps, the biggest investment decision of your life. We plan to achieve this task by presenting to you relevant facts and figures for several real estate market areas.

Productive Arguments

Arguably, the best benefit of this blog to us is that it forces us to be experts on our local market. By continually reading, researching and asking questions about our market, we are learning at a pace we never thought possible and we are loving every minute of it.

We strongly encourage productive arguments, differing opinions and perspectives from  our readers. As Jim Collins once said, “The best students are the ones that don’t completely agree with their professor”. Though it may hurt our egos at times, productive arguments and differing insights always lead us into a deeper understanding of the market.

Crawl,Walk, Run

We view the development of this blog in stages:  crawl, walk, and run. This assumes a progression over time that requires patience, anticipation, and dreaming/planning/hoping. This blog is not, now, all that it will be.

The Messenger Not the Message.

Jon Cheplak, one of our industry’s most effective leaders once said, “We should never forget that the market is the message and that we (realtors) are the messengers.”

We believe in the objectivity of the market. We believe that facts & figures ninety-nine percent of the time will reveal the truth.  We may not like what it is saying but we heed what it is revealing.  We are neither optimists nor pessimists about the market; rather, we are realists…

*The Stockdale Paradox confronting the brutal facts.
excerpts from the book Good To Great by Jim Collins

The name refers to Admiral Jim Stockdale, who was the highest ranking military officer in the “Hanoi Hilton” prisoner-of-war camp during the height of the Vietnam War. Tortured over 20 times during his eight-year imprisonment from 1965 to 1973, Stockdale lived out the war without any prisoner's rights, no set release date, and no certainty as to whether he would even survive to see his family again.

After his release, Stockdale became the first three-star officer in the history of the navy to wear both aviator wings and the Congressional Medal of Honor.

“I never lost faith in the end of the story,” he said, when I asked him. “I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”

I didn’t say anything for many minutes, and we continued the slow walk toward the faculty club, Stockdale limping and arc-swinging his stiff leg that had never fully recovered from repeated torture. Finally, after about a hundred meters of silence, I asked, “Who didn’t make it out?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” he said. “The optimists.”

“The optimists? I don’t understand,” I said, now completely confused, given what he’d said a hundred meters earlier.

“The optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say,‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”

Another long pause, and more walking. Then he turned to me and said, “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

To this day, I carry a mental image of Stockdale admonishing the optimists: “We’re not getting out by Christmas; deal with it!”

*Source: http://www.jimcollins.com/lab/brutalFacts/index.html#, excerpts from the book Good To Great by Jim Collins

To Be Rather Than To Seem.

It is a fact that our profession does not have a very positive image on the majority. Many of those assumptions, I admit, is true. The only remedy we know to positively change this is to give the people real value. Not just the spoken ‘values’ you see and hear on tv and radio, or the words ‘value’ written all over our business cards. But giving real value through abundant sharing of real estate information, in hopes to help you in your decision-making and eventually gain your trust and consequently, your business.