Wow, I can’t believe this is our first blog entry on this brand spanking new site we have. The goal of our blog is to express ourselves and show our clients, potential clients, bystanders, people looking for comedic relief and everyone else just who we are. We try to be as genuine as we can to allow you a chance to get to know us. It’s rather fitting that lately I have been reading a book called “The Serving Mindset” by Farnoosh Brock. In this book, she differentiates the motive of serving over selling. I find that it describes our mindset perfectly. For those who don’t want to read the entire book, I have attached the youtube video of Farnoosh giving a presentation to the Talks at Google crowd (speaking of Talks at Google, I am seriously jealous of anyone who works at Google). For us, the first principle that we uphold is this, “The purchase of a home is one of your most important financial decisions in your life, and we get it.” I really should have a tshirt made with this simple slogan. As simple as it sounds, people often miss the point. There are two important aspects to this slogan. The first is the word financial. I think everyone understands the idea that a home is an important space for anyone as most people spend most of their time in this space. But what people miss is how important this is financially. To illustrate this, lets look at things this way. According to StatsCan, the median wage for a bachelor educated person in canada is about 68K for female and 82K for male (this isn’t really fair btw), so let’s take the average of that and say its roughly 75K. To get a bachelor degree you need to spend about 4 years on average; let’s further assume that you will work say 30 years in a career. So your total earnings over your life time is about 75K times 30 years or 2.25 million. That is 2.25 million pretax btw. After taxes, you are likely looking at about 1.5 mil. Last year the average vancouver home cost somewhere around 1 million. It means that 66% of your life time after tax earnings went into this home. So let’s do this simple math, you took 4 years to study for a degree, 66% of your after tax earnings are going to be used buying your home. So technically if you spent two years looking for that home it wouldn’t be too much to ask as the amount of time spent analyzing this financial asset should be somewhat commiserate on the time you spent learning to generate the income needed to pay for said asset. Everyone still with me so far? Part 1 was that this purchase is one of the most financial decisions in your life. The second part is that we genuinely get this. We spent hours analyzing data for a reason. Starting with this lengthy diatribe against rushing into home purchases. But most of all we get this because we were once in your shoes. See, we love this field because our initiation of it wasn’t as an agent, it was as a buyer. We needed a service that truly understood how important this decision was for us financially. Well, it’s easy to say that we get it, what do we do to serve you better? Today’s economy is called the knowledge economy for a reason, it’s fueled by, well.. knowledge. We try our best to acquire as much knowledge as we can. See we believe in reading, and by reading, we mean reading a lot. You will see this in future blog posts as we share what we have learned through our reading. Real estate is the manifestation of our passion but it is by no means the limit of our curiousity. The funny thing is that the more we have read, the more we see knowledge that is seemingly unrelated yet so valuable to the business of serving our clients in real estate. It’s rare that you find profound wisdom about real estate from Sun Tzu’s Art of War for example (and no it is not know thy enemy that we learned). So we seek to share this in our future blog posts. We also welcome you to share with us what your thoughts are, feel free to send us an email. If you like our blog, feel free to share. If you don’t, send us an email and tell us why, criticism is the key to growth. Oh, and if you have questions about real estate, also feel free to email, that is our business after all, to serve you in one of the most important financial decision of your life, and btw, we seriously get it.
