Coffee heat rising

Real estate

Entertaining for Fun and Profit

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There! Everything is mise en place, the sausages are on the grill, the water’s heating for the coffee, and I have seven minutes to spare. As soon as my friends get here for this morning’s little brunch and tête a tête, all that will remain is to flip the meat a couple of times, toss some milk and flour in the blender, whirl the stuff around, pour it into a hot pan with melted butter, and stick the thing in the oven. Fifteen or twenty minutes later: voilà! A brunch that can’t be beat.

Well. It could be beat if I were serving something like champagne, tequila sunrises, or bloody Mary’s. But they get coffee and grapefruit juice. This is Monday morning, for hevvinsake.

La Maya and I have invited our realtor friend, whom we’ll call JS here, for a nice brunch and some prospecting conversation. He’s interested in laying the groundwork for future client relationships (La Maya and La Bethulia have expressed some disenchantment with their long-term realtor), and she and I are both interested in learning whether the real estate business is worth pursuing for retired academics.

La Maya has another eight or ten years before she can retire, though she’s expressed an interest in retiring at the earliest possible moment (like, oh…maybe tomorrow?). I’m already on the street, having been laid off two years ago and found that no one will hire an old bat to do anything, at least not anything that pays as much as minimum wage.

I need to earn more than adjunct teaching pays—not much more, actually—and it needs to come in year-round. La Maya thinks she’ll need something after retirement to keep herself active and to help her and La Bethulia continue to live in the style to which they intend to remain accustomed.

She would be a great sales person, because she has a warm and engaging personality. Me…not so much. I’m a writer because sitting in my garret suits me, and in fact it may be the only thing I can do. But still…I do stand up in front of 25 or 30 adult students on a regular basis, so maybe I can pass for something less hermitic.

* * *

Several hours later

That came off nicely. The food was good. The dog was a pest. The human company was convenable. And we learned a lot about starting in the real estate biz.

First, what we know is that JS and his wife are both MBAs from good schools. They each had respectable corporate careers, which after a number of transfers took them to Minneapolis, where they resided for some time. During that time, they each were laid off three jobs—apiece! Finding themselves unemployed for the third time, they concluded that enough was enough and decided to buy a Mrs. Field’s Cookies franchise here in Phoenix. Shortly after arriving here (he said within two weeks), they realized that would never do. But they stuck with it for about three years until they managed to sell the business. At that time they had plenty in savings and figured they would just be retired people.

About that time they had a late-life kid, by choice. “Best decision I’ve ever made in my life,” says he.

Then the stock market crashed, so one of them needed to go back to work. He was more or less enticed into real estate by a friend; took the classes planning to go into commercial property sales and then, influenced by a particularly articulate instructor, decided to try residential sales instead.

He says he loves it (and he indeed seems to): says he’s never worked so hard in his life and never enjoyed a job so much.

The trick, we’re told, is to treat the enterprise as a business, not as some sort of part-time gig. He says you have to work at it full-time (or more), always be developing leads and prospects, always keep abreast of the changing market, and have a coherent, first-rate marketing strategy. He’s very good at marketing: that’s what he did for the huge corporations where he worked in management.

Now, here’s the kicker:

I asked, as subtly as I could, how much a person could expect to earn at real estate; then La Maya put the question more frankly.

He said that in your first year, if you’re working at it full-time, you can expect to gross $30,000 to $40,000, before expenses. After ten years, he’s making about 200 grand.

After sixteen years, La Maya is earning 33% of that, in a tenured position. Prorate that nine-month salary over twelve months, and you still end up with significantly less than half of JS’s take. Me? After ten years in academe, I was earning 33% of it over a twelve-month contract. Now I’m making $14,400 a year.

WTF!?!

As you can imagine, this got our attention.

La Maya now thinks she will take a year to enroll in the required courses on the side, get a license, and, if she can get away with it, begin slowly to build a following. This would put her in a good position to take off when she quits her GDU job in about five or six years.

I’m thinking it would be worth trying to get the license fairly quickly (possibly even paying a proprietary school for the courses, since the junior colleges don’t offer them in a timely manner). Then start building the business forthwith. Thirty grand doesn’t sound like much. But even if you had to fork over 40% of it in taxes and overhead, you’d still be left with a net $18,000.

The net on what I earn now ranges from $11, 520 to $13,440.

So…if JS is correct, even on the low end, first-year income would still net significantly more than I’m making now. An extra $4,560 would make a huge difference for me, to say nothing of an extra $6,480. It would mean the difference between scrabbling along, pinching every penny and not even being able to go to a movie or a concert, and living a fairly normal middle-class life.

Before this afternoon, I was wavering about the real estate class. It takes place on the evenings of the two days I teach, which means I get two Days from Hell each week, and I double my commute cost because I have to drive out to campus twice on each of my teaching days. I’ve wondered if the results would be worth it.

However, I now think it’s a good idea. I’m just gonna do it. It’s only five weeks. Then I’ve got to find the second course somewhere and take the ½-credit contracts seminar. Once I have those things in place, I’ll try to get a job as a flunky somewhere, carrying an experienced agent’s luggage. I’m not going to quit teaching until I see if I can succeed at this enterprise—I now have the classes down to such an art they don’t take much time to manage. But if 30 grand comes in the door during the first year, you can be sure I’ll never set foot in a classroom again.

Good-bye to the schoolhouse!

Business Starts a-Poppin’

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Wow! The corn is popping hereabouts! It’s almost 11 a.m. and there hasn’t been enough time to pause long enough to add a post, either here or at Adjunctorium. We have two clients in hand, both with projects they think we’re going to do right this minute, and a third on the phone inquiring about our services.

None of these folks appears inclined to pay us a living wage. Can’t blame them: I try to bargain service providers down as low as they’ll go, too. Maybe we should be asking absolutely ridiculous prices and then, when people beg us to come down, offer “bargain” rates that really are what we need to pay the overhead and put food on the table.

Naturally, the business shows signs of life moments after I sign up for a voc-ed course designed to get me into a new line of work.

Yesh.

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, in these parts the sole perq adjuncts get is a tuition waiver. This will make it possible for me to take the two courses and the half-credit seminar required to get a real estate license, without having to pay more than about $45.

The first course runs from March 20 to May 5. Unfortunately, it meets on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, and of course my classes meet T/Th, from 12:30 to 3:45 p.m., and of course my business group meets at 7:00 a.m. Thursday mornings. So during those seven weeks, I’ll have 14 Days from Hell (especially on Thursdays: on the fly from 6:30 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. Ugh!). But I can put up with it, especially if I can pick up the second three-credit course over the summer and be ready to take the exam in the fall.

Bleagh! I really don’t look forward to taking any more college courses. With a Ph.D. in hand, I feel I’ve had quite enough of those. However, really…I do need to earn more than I’m making at the community college, and for sure, there’s just no way I’m going to keep teaching after the legislature finally pushes through its guns-on-campus bill. Even a part-time job as a gofer in some real estate office would pay more than I’m earning now, probably with a great deal less annoyance.

Drat it. Almost 11:00 a.m. and I haven’t even had a minute put my clothes on to go do the running I have to do today. And M’hijito took the bag of dog food I bought for Charley on Friday.

He’s been feeding the dog a fish-based kibble, which makes him stink to high heaven and which Charley has decided he won’t eat any more (goood dog!). So I bought a small bag of blander stuff to see what he would do, and lo! He scarfed it right down. M’hijito is irked because he has 80 pounds of the fishy stuff in house. He’s not the return-it type, and so he thinks he’s either going to have to force it down the dog or throw it out. I told him I would take it back, but of course he thinks that’s mother-martyrdom and will not go along with any such scheme.

A-n-n-n-n-n-d…

Just to make life perfect I just spilled an entire cup of cold, stinky, stale coffee down into a file drawer, all over the floor, and even managed to splash it onto this computer.

ahhh shee-ut. This is gunna be another Day from Hell, isn’t it…

Jobs: Out of the Frying Pan

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Yesterday I used my faculty tuition waiver to sign up for one of the two courses required to get a real estate license. Well…two and a half—there’s a half-unit thing on contracts you have to take before you can sit for the exam. As soon as I can get through them and get a Realtor’s license, I’m going to try to find a part-time  job as a gofer in a real estate office.

I’m not interested in selling houses—don’t think I would be good at sales. What I’d like to do is help a successful sales agent with the behind-the-scenes stuff: filling out paperwork, filing, answering the phones, keeping track of appointments. My friend who is a very successful agent tells me that state law requires anyone working in a real estate office, no matter what the job, to be licensed. He says the courses are very easy and even kind of interesting.

Thanks to the waiver, a three-credit course costs me $15. Not a bad little lagniappe: resident tuition at the community colleges here is $75/credit hour. So all-told the underpaid teaching gig should save me about $445.

It’s a pain to have to change course this late in life. However, there’s no question in my mind that sooner or later our bat-brained legislators are going to succeed in making it legal to tote a gun onto the campus. And that is just beyond the pale: no way am I going to stand up in front of a classroom not knowing which and how many students, some of whom are even crazier than the local politicians, have pistols in their backpacks and purses. That is just simply unacceptable.

These courses are offered in short sessions, so I with any luck I should complete them by the end of this summer or, at the latest, by the middle of fall semester.

I figure a 50% FTE job as an underling in a Realtor’s office can’t possibly pay much less than I’m earning teaching in the colleges, and the salary would come in 50 or 52 weeks a year. The business of getting paid eight out of twelve months—when in fact you’re filling your summer and winter breaks with unpaid course-prep work—is for the birds.

Actually, if I did sell houses I might earn as much as I do teaching without putting in a lot more than 20 hours a week. A real estate agent has to split his or her sales commission with the broker and the agency: that is, on a 6% commission, the selling agent gets 3% and then has to fork over half of that again, finally pocketing around 1.5%. So, on the sale of a $200,000 house, you’d make around $3,000 (from which you’re paying the cost of continuing ed, wear and tear on your car, phone service, etc.).

Well. At that rate I would have to sell 5.6 $200,000 houses to earn what I make if I carry the maximum load allowable for adjunct faculty.

That probably isn’t an unreasonable goal, even for a newbie.

At least this will give me a back-up plan. I’d continue to teach the online magazine writing course, if the chair agrees. But I am not going into a classroom full of armed eighteen-year-olds and nutcases.

Welcome to class!

Image: Semiautomatic pistol. Yaf. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

High Noon: Concealed Weapons on the College Campus

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Having been vetoed by our governor last year, our wacko legislators are trying again to make it legal for students and faculty to carry concealed weapons on college campuses.

Does anyone need any other evidence of how crazy these people are? Even after the bonkers defunct Senator Russell Pearce was yanked out of office by a recall election, they just don’t get the picture that Arizona still has some rational citizens.

Pearce promptly found new work as the state Republican party’s vice-chairman (its no. 2 position) and still maintains a Web page describing himself as Senator. Why bother to take it down, after all? He intends to run again to take the seat back.

When (not “if,” I’m afraid) they finally push this crazy legislation through, I’ll need to consider whether I really want to stay in the classroom, or if there’s some other way to make what passes for a living here.

It sounds melodramatic to say you’re not going to stand in front of a class when who knows how many students are toting pistols around. But to understand the situation, all you have to do is watch the video of Pima Community College that poor nut case Jared Loughner posted before he shot an elected representative and a bunch of innocent citizens, including a child.

Loughner is far from unique. Every college and university campus hosts a few people who are so far lost in the wilds of mental illness that they’re capable of anything. The last thing we need to do is make it OK for them to arm themselves. And between you and me, I don’t think it’s worth risking my life to earn $2,400 per 16-week class.

The idea that if everyone is armed we’re all going be safe…my god! Is it even possible to express how absurd that is?

In the first place, the fact is most people do not easily shoot another human being, all bragging to the contrary. No matter what we think we’ll do, few of us know exactly how we will react under stress. It takes training—a lot of it—to prepare a person to make a decision, under duress, to kill another person and then move to do it quickly and accurately.

And in the second place, few American citizens get that kind of training. At civilian ranges you learn to shoot at motionless targets. By and large it takes military or police training to learn to shoot a moving target accurately, and it takes a great deal of psychological preparation to shoot a moving target that happens to be a human being. How many of the 18-year-olds wandering around college campuses have that kind of training? A few returning veterans may, but that’s about it. And I can guarantee that not one in a hundred college professors have a trained shootist’s mindset.

My father was a military sharpshooter and he remained a firearms enthusiast all his life. I have one of his guns, and yes, I’d use it against an intruder, given the right circumstances. But I don’t practice often enough to delude myself that I could strike an assailant in a classroom without hitting a kid, too—or even that I could get at a pistol in time to do much if such a person burst into the room.

My own strategy for avoiding harm is simply to stay out of harm’s way. And since our legislators propose to bring a lot more harm into my workplace, I guess it’s time to consider how I might find some other workplace.

At my age, there’s not much I’ll be able to do. But I have considered that during this relatively slow semester I could get myself licensed as a Realtor. The course, I’m told, is very easy, and as an adjunct “employee” I can probably take it for free through the community college. While I’m not much of a salesperson, I certainly could work as an assistant in a real estate office. In Arizona, you need a Realtor’s license even to work as a gofer for a real estate office. Pay would be low—but what I’m earning now is lower than low. A part-time job filling out forms and answering phones would at least bring in money through the summer instead of just eight months a year.

Real estate. Maybe it’s time to take a closer look at that.

Real Estate: Lookin’ Up…WAY Up

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So I cruise into the neighborhood just in time to spot a perky-looking Realtor setting up a couple of open-house signs pointing up into a little enclave I happen to covet (unrealistically). Naturally, nothing will do but what I have to take a side-trip to view that thing.

It’s at the end of a pretty, quiet cul-de-sac…and it’s a place I’ve seen before. It was on the market last fall for $290,000; sold in September. At the time, it defined “dump.” I couldn’t believe such a wreck was standing on such a sweet little street, but then had to acknowledge that our big, sprawling classic 1950s North Central ranch houses are getting old. Very old.

So I thought, well, what the heck. If they couldn’t unload it, maybe it’ll be on the market for something close to what I can afford, and for a modest 100 grand or so I could renovate it and dwell in genteel splendor until they cart me off to the old-folkerie.

HOLY mackerel! Take a look at what they’ve done to the thing:

See that refrigerator? It’s bigger than my master bedroom closet!

These photos of the kitchen do not do justice to what the fix&flippers have done. Everything in there is absolutely primo, and it is GORGEOUS! Too, you have to have seen what a disaster area the place was to appreciate what they’ve accomplished.

I want this bathroom. I don’t want to clean it, but I want it:

You, too, can wipe down the shower from ceiling to floor and clean the inside of those glass doors every time you bathe:

Only a person who enjoys supervising servants could covet living in this house. But…it really is quite beautiful. They’ve done an awesome renovation job.

For 3,254 square feet of this, they want a mere $545,000.

And that is a good sign. About $500,000 is what an updated North Central ranch house a block off a large, green park is worth. Or rather, what it was worth before the bubble inflated. While prices were insane, places like this in the neighborhood were selling for between $750,000 and $1 million. In the ensuing bust, you could have scored a comparable shack for $350,000. Or less, if it needed serious renovation. I came very near to buying one on an irrigated half-acre for $250,000, but backed off after contemplating the sheer amount of work required to modernize it. Someone else bought it and turned it into a palace.

That prices are returning to their pre-bubble state bodes well for M’hijito and me, who are still upside-down on a house we bought as prices were falling and (falsely) appeared to be about to bottom out. La Maya noted that an identical house on the next street north of M’hijito’s place was on the market for $225,000. We don’t yet know what it sold for, but since it moved quickly, we figure they probably got around $200,000. That is in the ball park of what we owe, suggesting that within another five years we should be more or less OK on the mortgage.

Four factors are working in our favor:

• First, residential inventories are reaching historic lows. The Valley now has slightly less than a two-month supply of houses for sale on the market.

• Second, people who defaulted or did short-sales two or three years ago are starting to recover and become eligible to take out home loans again. This means a lot of folks who have been paying off debt while living in miserable rentals are anxious to get back into homes of their own.

• Third, mortgage rates are in the sub-subbasement.

• And fourth—this is huge!—appraisers and lenders are beginning to provide two appraisals: one comparing a property with all other recent sales in the vicinity, and the other using only “regular” sales (not short sales; not foreclosures) as comparables. That strategy produces a valuation considerably higher (and IMHO more realistic) than the likes of Zillow are tossing out there.

I think we’ve got a good shot at seeing values return to where they should be, which is where they were before the crazed frenzy took hold.

First to recover will be central areas like mine and M’hijito’s. His neighborhood is just as ripe for gentrification as it was before the crash of the Bush economy, and as a matter of fact houses up and down his street are already beginning to look a lot better maintained.

My neighborhood at least is holding up; we were really thumped when the city ripped out an entire row of nice homes along 19th for the construction of the damn train that now is never going to be built. It’s not outside the realm of possibility the houses that were blighted by this moment of bureaucratic idiocy will recover someday. It’ll be quite a while, but it could happen. As gasoline prices rise (and they certainly will), the houses here and in M’hijito’s even more centrally located neighborhood will grow more and more desirable.

At any rate, it looks like we may be seeing the beginning of the end of the housing crisis, at least in the central parts of Phoenix, Arizona.

Moments of Light

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Moments of light: that’s what Wordsworth called those instants of transcendent vision that our excellent pastor calls the “thin places” between this flesh-bound world and the view of spiritual reality. It’s surprising how little it can take to elicit an “ah-hah” moment, the “I can see clearly now/The rain is gone” insight.

A day or two of peace and quiet and several seven-hour nights of decent sleep are all it’s taken for me, this time around. As the avalanche builds while our beloved McBoingers concoct their final, most brilliant papers they’ve ever written, only a few excused late stoont paper have remained to be read. M’hijito’s decision to take vacation time coinciding with a holiday sprang me free of a full day of performance and grading also freed me from hectic puppy-sitting, allowing me and Cassie to rest, exercise, and think. (Well. I don’t know if Corgis think, although I suspect they do. But the Human certainly did a fair amount of thinking.) Thanksgiving at our friends’ house, replete with a bottomless well of free booze, provided six hours in which to stop focusing on workworkworkworkwork and to tie a fairly large one on.

Thinking and drinking. Drinking and thinking.

And here’s what I think:

Mark Twain was right when he said some writers are tone-deaf. We see that most clearly when we force writing out of souls for whom text-messaging is a challenge. For me, reading composition papers must to be akin to what our highly educated, musically sophisticated choir director would feel if he had to hear all forty of us, professionals included, screeching some classical piece off-key.

“When a person has a poor ear for music,” said Twain, “he will flat and sharp right along without knowing it. He keeps near the tune, but it is not the tune. When a person has a poor ear for words, the result is a literary flatting and sharping; you perceive what he is intending to say, but you also perceive that he does not say it. This is Cooper [substitute “the freshman comp student”]. He was not a word-musician [not by a long shot!]. His ear was satisfied with the approximate words.”

It is painful for me to read the stuff so carelessly dumped on my desk. When I said, after several years of supporting graduate school by teaching English 101 and 102 courses, that I would go on welfare before I ever taught another freshman comp course, that is what I was talking about. This morning it was all I could do to keep what remains of my mind on those gilded words long enough to comment on them and assign them a score. Absolute agony.

Insight #1: I really, really, REALLY don’t want to do this for the rest of my functional life. If I have to, I suppose I will, because I can’t make ends meet right now. But if I can find another way, I’ll take it.

But…but would I take the full-time teaching job for which I’ve applied, were it offered?

Insight #2: Damn right. I’m in terrible straits financially, and I can’t go on like this much longer. Pay for full-time faculty in the district runs on the high side of respectable. Five or ten years at that grindstone, as painful as it sounds, would allow me to recover the losses to my retirement savings that happened when I was laid off my job. And it would be enough to let me buy the last car of my driving lifetime and get myself into a home that will accommodate me until they cart me off to Hospice.

So. Yes, she said. Yes.

howEVER….

Insight #3: Truth be told, I do not need $65,000, $70,000, $81,000 to get by just fine.

If a miracle happened and the church happened to offer me the rather interesting job it has open just now, for which I happen to have applied, would I accept it and its amazingly low salary?

Oh, yes, she said. Yes!

Money-wise, the ridiculously low salary would combine with Social Security to provide a living wage: $45,000 or $48,000 gross.

I would love to work for the church, partly because I love the church and partly because I truly do believe I can do the job.

Would there be a learning curve? Sure.

Can I do the tasks? Yeah: I’ve been doing all those for the past five or ten years.

Would I be willing to pay, out of my own pocket, for specific training to do that job ? Darn right: give me an offer and today I would sign up for an accounting course, or I would bribe my accountant to train me in GAAP and the application thereof.

Moment of light: Any day I would rather enter numbers in spreadsheets, ride herd on financials and employees, and keep an office hanging together with paper clips and Scotch tape than read another student paper.

🙂

Here’s another moment of light: the American Dream, Formerly Affluent Boomer rendition.

O

M

G

!

Just look at that place!!!!

I know that neighborhood. I’ve haunted it in the past, when prices were way, way, WAY beyond my price range. A short sale, however, brings this updated little babe right down to what I think I can net off the house I’m living in.

Lookit that kitchen! Okay, okay…no gas. But hey! I hardly cook anymore…in the depression that accompanies Old Age, I don’t feel like eating, much less like cooking. And do I or do I not have the Propane Barbecue of the Gods? If I want to do some serious cooking, I’ll take it outside.

Lookit those patios!

Lookit that yard! Is that or is that not Cassie Heaven? It’s even Human Heaven. NOOOOO swimming pool!!!! Lookit those patios! Lookit those trees! Lookit that privacy!

Well. There is a swimming pool. Someone else gets to take care of it. 🙂

Lookit those acres of greenswards, all common areas. Cassie would not even have to walk a block and a half to sniff every waft of dog pee ever deposited on this earth. At least, in her limited little doggy universe.

Lookit those freaking DOUBLE-PANED FRENCH DOORS AND WINDOWS. Oh god oh god oh god. I think I have found nirvana.

Let’s hope no one has found it before me.

I have asked the credit union if I can prequalify. I have asked a friend in my business group if he can round up some investors who will lend me enough for a bridge loan, damn the usurious interest rates. I. WANT. THAT. HOUSE.

Moments of light.

Have you spotted any lately? What are they?