Just finished a most interesting interaction with a woman from Florida - for the second time in as many days.  I’ll apologize up front for those who might be / are offended by the title of this post - but it simply fits as you’ll see reading on. 

She called yesterday from one of the larger communities in Florida and indicated that she had been following our website and data crunching for a few months now, and was searching for the “next hot emerging market” in which to purchase an apartment building. 

She made it clear, rather intently and forcefully yesterday, that she was looking for a yet undiscovered emerging market that would “unquestionably” produce returns on her investment of 30 to 35% over the next several years.  She questioned whether or not our system was “good enough” to find such a market, and insisted that we “guarantee that the market would produce”. 

I spent a fair amount of time on the phone with her yesterday reviewing how our algorithm was designed and what we focused the data tools to rank highly.  Assuming she was joking about the “guarantee that the market would produce”, I offered several light hearted comments about such a guarantee, and offered to share with her at no charge the market rankings from our last newsletter as she was considering subscribing to our newsletter. 

She accepted the offer of the free information and called back today with an hour of questions – mostly related to trying to define the one market in the country that would meet her criteria of a slam dunk multifamily market that would function over the next several years with “no risk”. 

After mining a great deal of information – she became quite angry and even abusive that we would not guarantee the performance of a market over the next three to five years.  She closed her contribution to our conversation stating that I was the leader of a “pack of stupid SOBs” and that we couldn’t “tell our ass from a hole in the ground”. 

I’ve been called a lot of different things over the years in my prior career, even had my life threatened, but have never had that metaphor applied directly.  We’ve had quite a laugh about it here in the office and are trying to figure out how to use the comment in a marketing campaign.  There have been some imaginative suggestions made thus far. 

There’s no question – times are stressful these days.  We’ve had a very rare commercial broker cry over the phone (no kidding) and some folks be pretty snippy, but for the most part we find investors and potential home buyers are hunkered down, waiting for evidence of a thaw in the credit markets (and there just might be some evidence – we’ll post some tomorrow), and even waiting to see how the election turns out.  Most folks we interact with day in and day out still have a spark of reason, still have a spark of civility, and still have the drive and sense of expectation to keep sifting through the data to find markets that make sense in the midst of a great deal of real estate and financial unrest.

We’d love to be able to guarantee the performance of specific markets over the next three to five years – actually there are indicators (think jobs and market growth patterns) that just might come close – though I think the fraud investigators of all stripes would descend up us like hawks if we started announcing guarantees of our ability to read the future of real estate markets.  

And to Ms. C in Florida – we’re doing some urgent research on the issue, but I think we probably can tell the difference.  Hope you find that “guaranteed return / no risk” market; we’ll keep looking for one too…….

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