“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work” – Thomas Edison

I believe that the current ‘down’ real estate market that we are experiencing offers some wonderful opportunities to us as real estate agents, and although it might take a fair amount of work, the rewards can be great. I tire of the agents who are walking around bad-mouthing the market in general and try to let them know that if they are truly willing to work, (something that a lot of agents just are not used to since they experienced the boom years,) there is great opportunity out there.

One of the areas that I believe will make people who work it a substantial amount of money is the short sale or pre-foreclosure market. I find it interesting that many of the so-called real estate gurus are doing the infomertial circuit on television stating the the window of opportunity is now and could close soon. (I would suspect that the window of opportunity for making money in that market could be open for a good amount of time yet.) 

I can tell you though from experience, working in that arena is a lot of work and if you are going that route you need to be prepared for extended periods of time. I’m certainly not saying that it isn’t worth it, because it is, but you need to also prepare for some frustrating times as well.

Lenders do some goofy things, for what reason I don’t know. I recently completed a short sale, but the lender, a well known very large company took forever to make a decision about whether to take the short sale or foreclose. I couldn’t understand why when the sale was only less than $30,000 short and I read where it takes a lender an outlay of between $50,000 to $70,000 to foreclose on a property, plus the time involved. They then end up in the real estate business, some place that they don’t want to be. Nonetheless, they dragged it out for almost three months longer than they needed to. Go figure! 

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Boy…don’t you wish that you could push a button and program your prospects to buy now? I sure do because the market here in Naples, Florida  seems stuck in those summer doldrums, even though I was talking with a friend this afternoon in New England and he told me it was 51 degrees there. (One tends to forget that when you live in paradise, it’s summer all the time!)

I have a feeling the more that the press uses the R word (recession), the more the real estate market across the country is going to stay stuck in the quagmire that we have been in for a while…actually it is beginning to seem like forever. Although I can’t worry about what is going on in the rest of the country, I feel for my fellow realtors, because it certainly is a mess! (And here we used to tell prospects and clients that Naples is a world-class destination, which it is, and we were pretty much insulated from what goes on in the rest of the country. Yeah right…Great pitch, but wrong!!!

I guess that we will just have to weather the storm and those who can’t stick it out will be returning to their jobs before the “gold rush”, or should I say land rush. Maybe that in itself isn’t so bad because we will flush out some of the pretenders or those that never should have been allowed real estate licenses, and Lord knows there are more than a few of them around So it’s back to bartending and cocktail waitressing, but not to worry, I’m a great tipper!

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