Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Pay it Forward

One of my good friends yesterday told me that in the 15 years he'd known me, he had never once seen me refuse a request for help from anyone, including offering it to some who never asked. I mentioned that to another friend who said that about covered it for him, too. I thought those comments incredibly generous and some of the nicest things anyone has ever said about me. It's true that we do a great deal of charitable work here at the Group, but today I thought I'd take a second and mention some of the huge number of people that have helped ME, perhaps by way of explanation about why I feel compelled to pay things forward.

Steve Stockdale, for instance, who once paid off a debt I owed back when my stock brokerage was fading into the sunset. Paid off a collection, in fact. I know he never told me about it; it's possible that he doesn't even know that I know. But I do, and I'm grateful.

Dr. David Harrison and his wife Stephanie, who have treated not only me but everyone in my immediate family to free dental care for the last 20 years. No kidding. Absolutely FREE, and without one single word about it to me. Just today I had my teeth drilled (the upper #1 was decaying under the filling), and he not only took another x-ray to make sure that he didn't have to drill TWO teeth (he didn't), he spent his 45 minutes - for the second time in two weeks - and made sure that the procedure was done absolutely correctly, with extra base over the nerve to keep me from having serious discomfort later. It worked. He never said a thing about it. He never does. He is an incredibly generous, kind, and gentle man, and I love him. You should call him if you need dental care, because the "care" part can't possibly be done better anywhere else. He's at 801-969-1802, and Stephanie might even answer the phone when you call.

Ellen Hadfield, who watches my children for nothing to let my wife do volunteer work at the local charter school. This is no small favor. I do not have quiet children, nor few of them.

Sean Snorgrass, who for Christmas bought my entire family dinner at Rib City, and last week went to the gun show in Salt Lake and bought me two boxes of .303 ammunition for my Enfield WWII rifle. And then refused to let me pay him.

Seth Hawkins, who once gave me an envelope filled with money - some three or four hundred dollars - when we were so broke we couldn't turn the heat on. Seth and Michelle, themselves, have never been wealthy by the world's definition, but they are the picture of class and compassion, not to mention determination. Seth once picked mangoes off a tree and sold them on the street corner in Puerto Rico to get food for his family. He tells the story that the mangoes weren't ripe enough to eat, but some stranger stopped and bought them all. There are people like this all over the world.

Barry, Richard, and Bryce Gardner, who were out cruising the neighborhood one day and saw that I needed help. We had just moved into this house, had all our life's possessions still in the garage, and Jeanette had just fallen into the crawl space onto the concrete and spend half a day in the hospital after being cut out of her clothes and rescued by the Lehi Paramedics. I was sick, most of the kids were dead tired, and I was sitting in the garage on the steps and just couldn't move another step. Up the driveway come these three huge men with great smiles on their faces and start picking up boxes and carrying them in. Two, three boxes at a time. In fifteen minutes, they cleaned out the garage, and without saying a thing except "you're welcome", shook my hand, went back off down the driveway, got into their truck, and left. I still choke up thinking about it, how bad we needed that help and how cheerfully it was given.

My mother and my father, my mother-in-law and my father-in-law. There is no possible way to match their generosity to me and my family. There are far, far too many instances to list. I have to get work done, after all.

My wife. Oh, Jeanette. What could I do without you?

There are more, and no doubt there are thousands of instances I can't remember or never knew about, people all over who go about doing me service and taking care of me (I am really kind of like a little kid sometimes) that I never notice and couldn't repay if I did. These people are out there in your life, too, you know. It might do us all good to make a list like this once in a while.

Thank you, all of you. May God bless you.

Thursday, January 18, 2007

Once More with Feeling

I was just finishing up my blog earlier today when my computer, which is possessed by the devil, decided to spontaneously reboot. Having lost everything, it's taken until now for me to be able to get back to the blog, but I wanted to mention something that happened today simply because of how unusual it was.

We're putting together the Pontificating Potty Post, and we have a plethora of photos from Twelfth Night. Olivia took most of them with her new digital camera, a lovely Kodak. Unfortunately, although the files, when you transfer them to your computer, look like they are standard .jpg files, they aren't. They don't print. Our printers can't read more than one of them at a time. This is a complication.

Steve, who is the office dogsbody and general fix-it-up chappie, started working on the problem at about 2pm. By 4, it was apparent that the problem was the picture format, so he called Kodak tech support to see if he could get the problem fixed. The tech, bless her heart, stayed on the phone with him for almost half an hour helping him navigate some new software and a host of other things until he could import photos into Publisher directly from Kodak EasyShare, even though Publisher is not one of the programs they support. It was an unusual effort from somone that couldn't possibly benefit from going the extra mile. Kudos to Kodak.

Unfortunately, all her help was useless, because in the end the pictures still wouldn;t print more than one at a time. So Steve printed them one at a time, scanned them back in, and THOSE files print just fine, thanks. So the Post will be late. But it will get there.

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Business as Unusual

We're undergoing a major business refocus here at the Group, looking at our business from a historical perspective and assessing what we need to do this year to get where we want to go in the future. If you know me, and most of you don't really, you know that I've had some experience with this. I was once a stockbroker, and I did the dotcom thing - which was all by itself a PhD in business-plan writing - and the Group has been through about five incarnations, validating my impulse when I founded it to just call it the Chris Jones Group so as to save on constantly changing business cards.

We'll be doing mortgages of course, and offering seminars in first-time homebuying and in real-estate investing, which is what we do now, and we'll keep sending out the Pontificating Potty Post, our monthly newsletter, which, contrary to the industry norm, is all original material. But there are other things we ought to be doing as well, I think, and we need to decide what they are. Our little two-desk setup as it stands is very cramped; should we be buying a building? Renting somewhere? How much of our monthly expenditures should be for marketing? Last year it was close to 40% - is that too much or too little (or just right)? What about staff? Ray's still doing his thing, and Olivia produces the marketing stuff, and Steve was hired last month to help handle the incredible amount of clerical stuff that we have to do, but are we getting to where a couple more loan officers would be useful? And how would we pay them? How much would they be responsible for doing? Do we have the punch to grow the business that much?

We're thinking. And advice would be welcome.

Thursday, January 11, 2007

The First Secret of Investing (part one of a series)

So, you want to be a real-estate investor.

Are you sure?

Yeah, I know all about the national publications that talk about how easy it is and how much money you can make, and I know about the infomercials that tell you how easy it is and how much money you can make (I love to watch these). There are lots of companies that will recruit you to be "a real-estate investor", when what they really want you to do is to buy (and to sell) their "educational materials" about how to be a real-estate investor. What you are about to read has nothing to do with any of that, except to use them as negative examples.

But there are secrets to real-estate. Instead of selling them to you for thousands, I will tell them to you one at a time for no money at all, and all you have to invest is 15 minutes of reading. Ready?

The First Secret of Real Estate Investing: cash is king.

I once sat through an "investors" meeting where the presenting guru told us that you don't need money to make money. This is perhaps true, else how would anyone have money at all, but it isn't true the way he wanted us to think. What he meant was, "I know you're all broke here or you wouldn't be in this meeting, but we know from experience that we can get blood from turnips much harder than yours, so if you'll just close your eyes to almost all objective reality, I can finish this thing up with a sale." He then proceeded to try to sell us all thousands of dollars' worth of investment education, which I would personally have advised everyone in the meeting to either 1) save or 2) keep for investing if they still wished to try it.

News flash: if it's that easy to do, it doesn't pay. This is an economic law. This is not to say that it might not be easy for you to do, if you are different than others, but if you are in all respects the same as everyone else, and it's that easy for you to do it, then it is that easy for everyone else to do it, too, and why would that pay? It might be easy for Kobe Bryant to play basketball the way he does (it isn't), but it isn't easy for me to play that way; in fact, it's impossible for practically everyone on the planet, which is why it pays Mr. Bryant so well to do it.

I, on the other hand, know lots of places to get money to buy real estate. I know more of these places than almost anyone, which allows me to get money more easily than other people, which means that I can do deals faster and easier than other people, so I can make money at it. In fact, it's cheaper for you to pay me to find you money than to find it for yourself (and it is, absolutely, cheaper), so I can leverage my expertise and knowledge to make a living. On the other hand, it would be best for me to pay someone with electrical expertise to fix my wiring. I can make my own food, but since I am only a slightly above-average cook, most everyone can cook as well as I can, so why would they pay me to do it?

In the same vein, if buying and selling real estate is really so simple a child could do it, why aren't my children doing it and earning their keep? The reality is, of course, that the easy deals are so easy anyone could do them, but they also don't pay very much (I am speaking here about market generalities, not about any specific deal you happen to know about - remember that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data"). It's the really hard deals that make the most money. Accumulating cash is hard (by cash I mean non-institutional money, free capital that can be moved from one place to another without the necessity of getting a loan), therefore deals that require cash are the hardest deals to do, and that is about 90% of the investment deals that exist. The more cash the deal requires, the harder the deal is to do, because it's so hard to get that much cash in the first place.

If you have cash, then, you can get to deals that mortals can't, and those deals will make money more often than not. Why? Because the seller in the deal, the guy that is not making the money you're going to make, has limited leverage. He has a property that doesn't have a big market, since the market of people with lots of cash is tiny indeed. Small market=small demand=low price (again in generalities). Since the only way to make money is to buy low and sell high, low price is key to investing profitability. You have cash, you're part of a small market, you get prices nobody else can get.

This is true even if some of the deal is financed, because that financing is going to be contingent in large measure on what percentage of the real-estate value has to be borrowed against. The smaller that percentage is, the better the loan for it. So those with cash can not only reach properties nobody else can, they can get those properties for less money every month than other people, meaning that their cashflow is going to be better, meaning that again, they can buy properties and make money where others might buy the same property but lose money on the deal.

Be smart. If you're going to be a real-estate investor, the first thing you need to do is accumulate cash. As much of it as you can, free of necessity to repay if possible. There are myriad sources of this cash; almost everyone can accumulate it and many can do so shockingly fast, but it often takes a professional to show them how.

Do you have to? No. You can get in the game with nothing down. You will not win that way in the long term, though, unless you are prepared to sell your soul, and if you are, stop reading this blog and go away. If you want to do it right, follow the secrets.

Secret 1: Cash is King. Remember that. It will save you about $5000 in "education" all by itself.

Next time, the second secret of investing: The 3 Cs.

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

The Crystal Ball for 2007 Says....

Markets continue flat with a slight upward trend, because the economy is showing surprising resilience in the face of a combination of negative factors. The Fed has done what we recommended - a first, I believe - and as a result homeowners, builders, and buyers are getting a sense that things have stabilized. Stability is key for markets.

We're into 2007 now and everyone's starting to ask questions about how the market is going to go. Wanna know?

Here it is: in Utah, especially on the Wasatch Front, this will be a good year for real estate. It will not be as good as 2006, but it will be better than any other year in the last decade, for appreciation and for rates. Rates will stay in the low 6% range. Houses will appreciate 10%. Good year.

Our standard disclaimer: this does NOT mean that YOUR house will appreciate 10% or that YOUR interest rate will be low. We're talking generalities here, not specifics. If you're an investor, you want the market sweep, the broad picture, but if you are just an individual homeowner or potential buyer, it's much more comforting to get the specific dope about your own situation. Which we would be glad to give you. Call us (801-787-2162).

I should put in here a Twelfth Night recap. For those of you not in the know, Twelfth Night is our annual charity ball (info here) and client appreciation event. We had over 200 people this year - doubling attendance again - and raised more than twice as much money as 2006. It is always amazing to me to see the generosity of the people I know, and since you're likely one of them, thank you. If you missed it, or forgot your wallet, or something, and you'd like to make a donation to A Child's Hope Foundation, please email the Empress of Impressions at olivia@thechrisjonesgroup.com. Take a trip to Mexico. They'll take you and you'll never be the same.

Special thanks to the BYU Ballroom Team, Britney Harper, Misses Provo, Spanish Fork and Lehi, Utah County Commissioner Steve White, Amy Jo Yates, Gordon Jones and the Music Makers, Melanie Mellenthin, Paul Jones (pf jones), Heather Hunsaker of LaVilla Salon, Bella Medica, James Roberts of Orange Realty, Robbie Robertson of TAZ Business Solutions, and Kirk from the Apollo Dance Hall, along with all our fantastic volunteers. Thank you a thousand times.

See you all next year, January 12, 2008.

Thursday, January 04, 2007

We're Still Here....

...but we're busy getting everything organized for the massive Twelfth Night Charity Ball, January 6 at 6:30pm. We're expecting 200 people this year. Man, that's one big party.

Please come.

We'll be back to the regular blog schedule on Monday. Unless I'm dead.