Bay of Quinte, ON

My last blog post was about a 100 year old runner who was entering the Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon. I found the story very inspirational. He was attempting to break a slew of records, but most importantly set the world record for finishing a marathon at his age.

Guess what?

Fauja Singh, the runner in question, did manage to finish in a time of eight hours and 25 minutes. This is absolutely remarkable. 22,000 runners participated, and while Mr. Singh was the last one to cross the finish line, he did cross it under his own steam.

Congratulations to Mr. Singh and to everybody who helped to prepare this amazing man for this event.

I guess I dropped the ball on this one. When I switched from Remax to Century 21 earlier this year I had to scramble to change all of my websites, internet profiles and virtual business cards. It took quite a while, and I'm sure there are still dozens of places on the web where I'm still listed as a Remax agent. When I first started building up a web presence I didn't realize that it should be done with such a disciplined approach and I just haphazardly signed on to any site that would allow me to link back to my websites without paying too much attention. Consequently, I have no idea where my mug will show up.

One of the most important profiles that I should have kept my eye on is my Google business profile since it shows up on Google maps and Google queries related to real estate in Trenton. I just use my gmail account as a gateway to access all my Google products such as my blogger blog, Google documents and my profile. Needless to say I haven't paid a lot of attention to it lately and just assumed that everything was alright with it. Well you can imagine my surprise when I stumbled across my own business profile and it was sporting another local agent's mugshot.

I have no idea how someone else was able to access my Google Business Profile and upload a picture of themselves. I can see why someone would want to though, it places very high in local Google Queries related to real estate, and since it was apparently dormant (mea culpa), I guess it might have appeared ripe for a takeover. It's the cyber equivalent of a hermit crab switching shells. No harm done really.

In my spare time I'm going to have to browse around and see if anything else has been hijacked. This is one excellent reason why people who are building an on-line presence should take a disciplined approach to the job and keep an eye on things.

Being a top notch, high-flying real estate agent isn't always easy. There are certain sacrifices that have to be made to attain this lofty space that I occupy in the spectrum of human endeavour.

Today is Labour Day, and when most people are getting a day away from work to celebrate the fruits of their labour, there are certain very important jobs that I must to to ensure that everything will work smoothly. Since it is said that a picure is worth a thousand words, I have decided to represent my tasks in a pictorial form, thus giving this short blog post the gravitas of a 6000+ word post.

I was warned that real estate wasn't going to be easy.

I listen to the radio when I'm in my car. Usually every hour or so I catch the news, and being Canadian, one of the most important features is always the weather. The winter is a whole different ballgame for me, once the temperature drops below a certain point I can't really tell the difference anyway, so I'm resigned to suffering without caring just exactly how much I'm supposed to be suffering.

In the last few years it would seem that the "humidex" plays a larger role in the delivery of the summertime weather presentation. The presenter will say "It's 29 degrees outside, but with the humidex it feels like 36." I always thought this was silly, because I don't know what 36 feels like. Just yesterday it was 36, but they told me that with the humidex it felt like 43. How the heck am I supposed to know what anything feels like because they are always telling me it feels like something else.

I decided to get to the bottom of this phenomenon, and this is what I discovered;

Now, I hope this clears up a lot of the confusion as to how they arrive at the "humidex" readings. It's pretty straightforward, no? Well then maybe the Wikipedia explanation will be a little simpler;

The current formula for determining the humidex was developed by J.M. Masterton and F.A. Richardson of Canada's Atmospheric Environment Service in 1979. Humidex differs from the heat index used in the United States in being derived from dew point rather than relative humidity.

The record humidex in Canada occurred on July 25, 2007, when Carman, Manitoba hit 53.0.[1] This breaks the previous record of 52.1 set in 1953 in Windsor, Ontario (The residents of Windsor would not have known this at the time, since the humidex had yet to be invented).

When the temperature is 30 °C (86 °F) and the dew point is 15 °C (59 °F), the humidex is 34 (note that humidex is a dimensionless number, but that the number indicates an approximate temperature in °C). If the temperature remains 30 °C and the dew point rises to 25 °C (77 °F), the humidex rises to 42. The humidex tends to be higher than the U.S. heat index at equal temperature and relative humidity.

The humidex formula is as follows:

humidex = (air temperature in Celsius) + h
h = (0.5555)*(e - 10.0)
e = 6.11 * exp [5417.7530 * ((1/273.16) - (1/dewpoint in kelvins))]

I suppose I will never really know what those numbers mean. I will just know that it's hot. That's all they really had to tell me anyway.

Last week one of my listings sold. This particular property had been listed since the fall and I was starting to despair that it would ever sell at the price it was listed. There were lots of showings at this house, and a lot of other agents had given me some fairly positive feedback for it. I will admit that the house was listed at the upper end of its price range, but my client decided that this was the price that she wanted, and ultimately I suppose she was right because she did get that price. Personally, I would have prefered to have seen it priced a little bit lower and maybe had a quicker sale, however it was my client's call.

The day after the house disappeared from the MLS listings I was contacted by two different people (one by email and one by phone) asking what had happened to the house. These were two people who I had never seen, heard of, or had any sort of communication with while the house was for sale. The one gentleman went so far as to say that he and his wife had been looking at the house for a few weeks and had their "hearts set on it". They had figured that it had been listed for so long that a price reduction was inevitable, and at that point they would have come to have a look. He seemed almost angry that someone had the nerve to buy the house before he was consulted. The other person, a lady sent me a nice email saying that she drove by the house almost every day on her way to work and that she was really hoping to get in and have a look sometime this spring because the location was perfect, the house and lot were the right size, and the pictures on the MLS looked so pretty. It would be a long time before a house that met so many of her wants and needs would be listed again.

I had to explain to them "you silly pratts, while you were sitting on the fence being too clever for your own good with your silly little games, someone with a backbone decided that they wanted the house and came and made a proper offer." that this was the nature of real estate. Sometimes when we are too finnicky and trying to squeesze the maximum advantage out of a situation because of our greed someone else will put an acceptable offer on the table while we are still dickering about weighing our options.

Normally I would have tried to turn situations like these around and offered to show them similar properties in the price range, but the problem is that there are none, and secondly the gentleman seemed genuinely hostile that I thought it best that I let him go elsewhere. Besides, I really don't like working with people who dither about and can't commit to something good when they see it.