We spend a lot of time in this business trying to analyze and make sense of both our successes and our failures. On the face of it, that’s certainly not a bad thing. But here’s how it usually goes:

Wow – we’ve had a quite a string of bad weeks in a row. Must be: 1.) Our site agent; 2.) The economy; 3.) The weather; 4.) The time of year/holidays…and so on.

Or, Wow – we’ve just had a couple of great weeks! Must be: 1.) The tax credit; 2.) Our great land planning and architecture; 3.) Buyers responding to our current incentives; 4.) The economy; 5.) The weather…and so on.

It’s hard to understand. What makes one two – week period great and a two-week period just a month later terrible? We don’t know, so we slice and dice and speculate away. Sometimes we even take action. But the reality is, far too often, that buyers (read: the market) are irrational. They react emotionally to what they read and hear on the news (good or bad), to  what their friends and colleagues (read: consultants) tell them. And they react to the simply everyday pressures that they face in their current home. It’s not predictable – at least on a week to week basis. And that’s frustrating to those of us who are paid to make sense of it all.

But here’s something I know is a constant. All housing purchases are driven by problems. Your current house is too big or too small. You just had a baby or your youngest just went off to college. You got married, or divorced. And somehow the home you’re living in, that once was the “perfect decision” for you at the time, is no longer perfect.

If we can focus on the problems potential buyers have – not in a negative sense – and determine as teachers and consultants if what we have provides a credible solution to that problem (with all of the inherent complexities that go with a home buying decision), we’re well on our way to a more steady stream of successes.

This morning I had to run by Best Buy and purchase a printer for a colleague of mine. I knew they opened at 10:00 a.m., but as luck would have it, I arrived about 9:50. Over the next ten minutes, I watched the crowd outside the front door build, as Best Buy employees reported to work using their key to slide in the side door. By 9:57 I got out of my car and joined the fray. By then I counted 18 people in line and another 7 waiting in their car watching. Now I have to admit, having 25 people waiting outside the door of my business, just dying to get in – what business wouldn’t love that?? But I stood there knowing exactly how this would play out. People outside growing more and more impatient as the clock neared 10. Lots of foot shifting and shuffling. And, just as I predicted, at 10:01.40 the doors finally opened.

I’m guessing somewhere in the Best Buy rulebook, it says, “Our store opens at 10:00 a.m. Monday – Friday”. So I guess by that standard, opening only a minute and forty seconds late would be considered pretty good. But what if an employee, seeing the growing crowd of impatient people outside the door, had taken the initiative to open at 9:55 a.m., greeting people by saying, “I can see you are all anxious to come in and buy something, so I thought I’d open a few minutes early just for you!”

But I guess that qualifies as some crazy, out-of-the-box thinking when what businesses really value (far too often) are employees who play by the rules. Does anyone else see a business opportunity here?

This morning I sipped my coffee and watched Matt Lauer anchor a story on “strategic foreclosure”. As soon as I heard those words, I knew we (yes, literally you and me) were in trouble. As the story goes, of course, a middle income family buys a home at the top of the market only to see its value dip during the downturn. While, admittedly they can afford to make their payments, they are making a simple business decision to walk away from their mortgage. “Hey – it’s just a business decision. We bought something, we can afford the payments, but it’s not worth what it used to be, so why wait for the equity to build over time? Let’s just dump our little problem on someone else (we’d like to think it’s those big, Cadillac-driving, cigar-smoking bankers…but it’s really you and me again). And then the Today show brings on the financial expert to tell us that while you’re credit score is going to take a hit, there are all these ways to creatively rebuild your score quickly, so it’s really won’t be that devastating after all. And I’m guessing those same people who are walking away from their mortgage had no trouble taking the mortgage deduction off their taxes when they were making their payments, and will no undoubtedly petition their accountant to find a way to take their “loss” off their taxes as well. So the impact grows and grows.

Does anyone else have that sick feeling in the pit of their stomachs? We want housing to recover, which will help drag the economy into recovery (especially in the jobs sector) and we’re now getting advice from a major media outlet on how to get rid of that pesky little problem called our mortgage payment? What’s next? Those Jimmy Choo’s I overpaid for and have worn a few times, they just aren’t exactly what I’d hoped for, so I think I’ll walk away from my credit card debt? I bought a car last month, then I found out it dropped in value as soon as I drove it off the lot. Hey, GM, it’s sitting in my driveway. Come and get it!!

The very heart of the housing problem started with people who bought a home for the wrong reasons (short term investment gain), and took a mortgage they knew they couldn’t afford if their home didn’t continue to gain in value at 10% – 20%/year. The very definitiion of irresponsiblity. And now, to add to that bad decision, they think it’s okay to just walk away from their debt because it’s “a strategic business decision”.

Foreclosure is a terrible thing. My heart breaks for those good, hard-working, honest people who have lost their jobs and now face losing the home in which they were raising their families. Let’s not denigrate their pain and flippantly add to our collective economic woes by taking the easy (my new synonym for “strategic”) way out.

Not a day goes by that I don’t hear it. The only thing selling is the big box – big square footage at a small price. I’ve had a lot of time to think about that, since I get hammered with it from all sides – my site agents, real estate management, consultants and general brokerage agents. If you want to succeed in this market – dumb down your design, up the square footage and lower the price.  But maybe I’m just a bit overly sensitive since our company typically approaches the value proposition a bit differently. I’m not sure “price at all costs” is a marketing strategy. Certainly it’s a decent one if you only intend to live to fight another day. Eventually that strategy will fail in my opinion. But I’ve been wrong before, so I thought I’d give this some more thought.

If all people want is the cheapest of things, that should extend to other high-ticket items, shouldn’t it? How about cars? Certainly if this economy has everyone shopping at WalMart, then it would stand to reason we’d all be driving the Hyundai Accent which retails under $11,000? So I did a very unanalytical analysis. I Google’d (that is a verb now, right?) auto sales for 1Q 2009. Very high level view. I simply put economy brands in one column and luxury brands in another column. It would be very easy to argue, though, that Ford, GM and others make some high-end cars within their brand. But I kept them in the “non-luxury” side for simplicity. Guess what? In January of 2009, over 78,000 people still purchased Lexus, BMW, Mercedes, Porsche or other expressions of their ego-status. Now, admittedly, that represented only about 15% of all the cars sold. But I think I could build a business model around those kind of numbers quite easily.

I’m convinced that we do a disservice to our customers when we assume the only “good” market out there in new construction is for the $250,000 or less box. Sure, the lower the price range, the broader the potential market. But typically when you buy at this price level, you take the short-term price fix and give back some of the long-term value-adders. If people are understanding that housing is back to the old rules – when you purchase, you won’t be able to turn a profit in only a year or two and are likely buying because you want a place to raise a family, build equity over the long haul, enjoy pride of ownership and all those other archaic notions we abandoned during the run-up – then perhaps the view of where the best place to purchase should include things like the sense of entry, the land plan, community maintenance, amenities, quality of design and a builder with history who will survive this downturn and be around to take care of those annoying punchlist items that invariably come up. Communities that embrace detail in these areas tend to bounce back more quickly from downturns and tend to appreciate more quickly than those big box communities.

If you’re a potential home buyer, I think this enormous investment bears a bit more thought. As a REALTOR counseling those buyers, I think you owe them the same thoughtful consideration about what really creates “value” in a housing purchase. I’m just sayin’…

Been seeking inspiration lately to write something for the blog. Working through “the dip” as Seth calls it. Finally. The Sunday Parade magazine’s annual issue on what people earn. I’m always fascinated how by fascinated Americans are with what other people make. Poet Taylor Mali sums it up nicely for me with this video about what teachers earn. Maybe his brusque retort to being asked, “What do you make?” will resonate for all of us and change our focus from what we gain monetarily to what we contribute societally.

There’s been plenty said on the topic of change over the years. Yet it still remains one of the most difficult things for many of us to do.  Sure, we pat ourselves on the back every day for the changes we do successfully make. We got those Twitter or Facebook accounts up and running. We downloaded an app to our Droid to hopefully make us more productive. But perhaps we made those changes because we wanted to in the first place. Yet somehow dieting, stopping smoking and breaking other bad habits doesn’t seem to come as easily.

The Heath brothers, authors of Made to Stick have nailed what’s behind the difficulty of change and how to effectively actualize it in their new tome, Switch. While I won’t give the book away as it’s worth the read, one of the things I like is their concept of “Bright Spots.” With Bright Spots, you look for  things that are already working and then slowly inculcate those successes into your organization. You make the changes first with a small group of people who are inclined to be passionate about your idea, and let the idea spread peer to peer. It’s got Seth Godin’s Unleashing the Ideavirus written all over it (another good read and currently a whopping $.99 on Vook).

There are two points here that are noteworthy in my humble opinion. Easy lessons for both builders and REALTORS to take away. First, is that it’s difficult to cause change with a big hammer. That’s how we used to do it, with bullhorns and threats. Instead, find someone out there already effectively embracing the change you seek and let them be the bright spot to those willing to get on board. Second, good ideas properly “mentored”, tend to tip (spread). But you can’t win the battle anymore with large masses of people. You have to seek your niche and let the passionate niche decide if your idea is worth spreading.

Target marketing has always been in our playbooks. But because we were comfortable with media like print and television, we tried to sell our ideas to large, non-targeted groups. What we did really didn’t match what we knew better to do. Social media, as just one example, has changed all that. Now we can narrow down. Find just a few people with similar passionate interests and let them spread the news for us. You’re probably saying, “Sure, that’s great if you’re selling organic candy bars, but how does that apply to housing and real estate?” Simply like this. Think smaller, not bigger. Do something extraordinary – be it a service, or a new housing design – and only go after the few right people who will appreciate what you’ve done. If it’s good enough, it will spread to more of the same people who will also appreciate what you’ve created, or provided.

Maybe it’s time to make a change to our annual business plans and start thinking small instead of thinking big. Comfortable with that? Probably not yet – but look for the Bright Spots of where it’s happening successfully and I think you can get there.

I love the Freakonomics guys Levitt and Dubner. I recently stumbled onto one of their NY Times blogs that raised an interesting question about the dangers of too much information. Will aspirins save our hearts or cause internal bleeding? Will consuming red wine benefit our health or lead us into alcoholism? And so on. Depending on how you parse the data, you can probably build a convincing argument to your way of thinking. That very knowledge probably makes us dubious about what to really believe to begin with.

To me, this is exactly the  problem facing housing today. Potential buyers are bombarded by conflicting information. Those of us in the industry well understand that it is actually a very good time to buy a home. Rates are low (and rising); the tax credit is coming to an end (and won’t be renewed); and builder concessions and incentives are still significant (on homes that are already well-priced). The public wants to believe us (well maybe not we builders, but at least their REALTOR), but can’t ignore much of the conflicting messaging they get about unemployment and the continuing potential for falling home prices.

The end result? Statis. Waiting…for someone to bring clarity…for a voice they can believe. I think they want more than a clear signal that it’s okay to venture out again, they practically want a guarantee before they’ll buy.

And we know what will happen. They’ll keep waiting, convincing themselves of the wisdom of their decision and how much they’ll benefit by outsmarting that other guy who took the plunge and bought now. And when the tax credit is over, FHA underwriting has tightened even further, rates have risen and some semblance of a housing recovery actually allows us to pull back some of the crazy incentives we’ve been hanging there, they’ll only have one sad question: “Why didn’t someone tell me??”.

I’ve witnessed two kinds of leadership styles over the years. One is the “management by intimidation” style. We’ve all met them. They think the louder they scream, they more apt you are to “git r done”. Probably didn’t work then and darned sure doesn’t work now.

The other is the “management by example” style. These are the people who have others rally around them out of desire, not fear. They get respect by giving respect. They are the people about whom the phrase, “Still waters run deep” was crafted.

Saturday night I was in attendance when the Catholic Charities of Eastern Virginia presented the Bishop’s Humanitarian Award to Fred and Jackie Napolitano. Watching the movie that chronicled their humble beginnings and seeing the contributions they have made to growing this region and supporting so many worthwhile charities and causes was awe-inspiring.

I’ve known Fred and Jackie for most of my adult professional life.  They are folks who always knew to check their egos at the door. I think they both embody the notion of quiet leadership. They are people you lean in just a bit to hear more closely, because you know what they have to say is worth listening to.

Quiet leadership. Something we need more of. I am thrilled that Fred and Jackie received recognition of their leadership, and contributions, over so many years. So well deserved. And I’m even more proud that they are leaders in my chosen profession.

I just returned from about 6 hours at Grassfield HS in Chesapeake where they are holding the local DI competition. For the uninitiated (which included me until this morning) that stands for Destination Imagination. This competition spans from Elementary through High School and is a world-wide in scope. At the heart of it are challenges that teams of children undertake (in the case of my son’s 3rd grade DI team – 6 kids total) with minimal adult guidance. The lessons are rooted in creativity, imagination, teamwork, understanding and using strengths and weaknesses and the like. While the adult mentor guides the process, the children have to design the solution, build the “solution” to the particular challenge and carry it out in a large auditorium with 8-10 judges milling around and a fairly large audience of nervous parents and giggly peers.

As I wandered the halls today, stepping in and out of everything from media centers with student reporters to robotics competition and my son’s particular challenge, “Direct Deposit” (they had to deliver bean bags “blindly” over a 6′ tall wall into targets on other side using levers, fulcrums and closed circuit cameras) I felt pretty comfortable our future was in good hands. These kids were phenomenal. And my favorite part (unlike most elementary school Science Fair projects) was that the parents were on the sidelines observing. It was truly the genius of these children at work. I think today I was seeing our next generation’s scientists, actors, math teachers and politicians. And I wasn’t afraid.

My only thought – can they take over sooner rather than later??