"Do not go gentle into that good night."
I’m writing this from a window seat on the Metro North to Poughkeepsie, having just spent three days in Brooklyn enjoying my first vacation in four years through which I didn’t “have” to work.
Maybe I did check email, confirm a closing months in the making, and respond to a potential lead. But all at my own behest, with a well-measured sense of relative urgency, and weighed carefully against the age-old question, “Just because I can, should I?”
The answer in this case was yes, easy yeses to further my business and take care of clients by being available, without originating any efforts, or sacrificing my own leisure time.
In real estate, as in life, the answer is often more ambiguous. Do we say “yes” to something annoying but not insufferable in service of making our future a little easier, or by jumping to a cause do we inadvertently perpetuate a cycle that will haunt us in the form of late-night texts under the assumption that we are ever-available, always ready to go?
Ghosts of Business Past
2024 is nearly over. I can’t say I’m going to miss it, but I am more thankful for this year than perhaps any other of my life.
Technically, on paper, this was my best year in business yet. I sold or referred out $23M in business, I worked on more transactions than there were months in the year, and I learned more about human nature and my industry than in many prior years combined. I am proud of my work, appreciative of my clients, and grateful to the colleagues with whom I worked side by side.
And though I kept it achingly close to the vest (until now?!), it was also my worst year, mentally. I worked seven days a week nearly every week of the year. My average commission split was soul-crushingly low because I too frequently accepted my role as a supporting agent with a gusto I didn’t recognize at the time as fear of the alternative—full independence. I took two vacations but actively worked through them to both my and my husband’s chagrin. I fretted over my inability to commit enough to the nonprofit whose board I volunteer on, and I deferred almost all the personal endeavors I was looking forward to in service of “getting somewhere” in my career.
I dropped out of not one but two marathons for which I’d registered and been excited about, because I couldn’t “find” the time to train properly or stay uninjured.
I learned brutal lessons about boundaries, and the ways people show up when unprepared or unable to face their own shortcomings. Lest I shatter this glass house, know that I discovered those in myself too; I grew intimately acquainted with deep resentment and frustration as I became increasingly overworked and undervalued—while simultaneously failing to communicate that effectively to others or accept that perhaps my working environment at the time just wasn’t the best fit for the ways in which I was evolving.
By the fall I was pretty successful, and desperately lonely.
Without belaboring the details, suffice it to say I came to a fork in the road and discovered I couldn’t bring myself to take either route because I wanted so badly to carve out a professional path of my own.
So I did, and here we are. And surprise surprise, I'm happy.
A New Year for Me: Bravery
If we’re lucky in challenging moments for the self, a catalyzing event comes along and gives us the push we need to recognize all the signs we’ve ignored for being blind to them or simply feeling incapable of accepting the effort it would take to let go of that which no longer serves us.
Sometimes that final revelation is a person, sometimes it’s a failure, sometimes it’s a win, sometimes it’s a creeping culmination and we wake up one morning with the confidence that things simply cannot go on as they have, and we make the overdue phone call.
If there’s one thing I’ve committed to in the forthcoming year, it’s to being brave. Not to being fearless, but to being scared and pressing on anyway.
Is it dangerous to share all this here?
I weigh frequently whether introducing the personal parts of this job, to admitting to imposter syndrome or anxiety or to over-empathizing and weak boundaries, adds fuel to the fire, or whether being transparent about the flip side of the perfectionist people-pleasing coin that often makes me successful, actually renders it so effectively cliché that it becomes blissfully uninteresting and fades into the background. Because isn't this all just so very typical?
Being open certainly doesn’t make me any less good at my job, or my life. In fact I’m hedging my bets that it’s going to make me better at both—if not for what it makes space for in me and my ability to be present and unencumbered by pretense, at least for your ability to trust that my tendency to transparency is an asset in an industry far often too opaque, when trust is paramount.
I chose to publish this, so here we are either way—you can tell me later whether this gave you pause or made you a champion of mine.
A New Year for Us: Perseverance
Enough about me, let’s talk about us, and my estimations as to what we have in store. If you’ve hung in here this long purely for the promise of notes on The Market, give me just a few more paragraphs; we’re nearly there.
Insofar as the world around us is concerned, I’ll give you the bad news first: We’re heading into a new year in which political discontent and myriad global crises continue to loom large. At our most openly cynical, it’s to the tune of “how many generations do we actually have left here,” while “I had to unsubscribe to The Daily for now” anchors the other end, that latter bit betraying a reluctant and unspoken hope of an eventuality in which we can safely shed survivalist myopathy and tune back in to a brighter collective reality.
The current landscape favors billionaires and fear, and eschews critical thinking. Attention spans are short, and historians’ warnings about being doomed to repeat ourselves fall on deaf ears because there’s too many people, too much disconnect, and too little cooperation. Desperation breeds short-sighted thinking and selfishness.
I don’t fault anyone for falling prey to those base instincts, I’m not immune, but when we pause for a moment to consider those animal tendencies, it’s easy to understand how we might get to a place of widespread apathy.
And I urge us to fight that!
Because more importantly, the good news: There are people who care a great deal about a great number of things in the world, who are self-aware, self-sacrificing, and honorable. The human race has a remarkable ability to insist on its own existence and bend the earth to its will—not always for worse (consider watching the show “Years and Years” if you want a painfully realistic suggestion of the tendency of ours to endure).
The effects of short-sighted choices we’ve made and continue to make don’t always come into play immediately—we do often have time to consider and course correct. Some of the choices we’ve made do make their consequences known quickly, but are less concerning than we anticipated.
There remains enough space for hope to slip in among the seeds of doubt.
The Market: “Nothing is Good or Bad but Thinking Makes it So”
Many of us have settled into a kind of acceptance (if a grim and rather recent one), that has allowed us to shake off the paralysis of holding out for a better potential, and soldier on.
We saw it in the fall 2024 real estate market, in fact—we had an unusually slow market in which buyers were hesitant and sellers were unready to adjust expectations, which led to something of a standoff that saw inventory sitting; both sides, all parties, were waiting for something to shift that would make paths more clear. A drop in rates, a guiding election outcome, some other yet unperceived deus ex machina.
And the election did help—whatever your feelings on its outcome, the mere fact of it being decided almost immediately resulted in an uptick in market activity. Condos sitting for 2-3 months went into contract, often close to asking. Sellers committed to coming on market in the new year. Sideline-sitting buyers entered the field eager finally to either scoop a deal on something just a little bit wanting, or to compete again properly on a move-in-ready product.
I’ll say this, and I genuinely don’t know if this is controversial: I do not believe you can say as a blanket term that a market is “good” or “bad,” because those the market serves or doesn’t aren’t a monolith. Even the term “the market” is devilishly vague. There are challenges in a “good” market as in a “bad one,” they’re just different.
A robust sellers’ market (often: lower inventory during a time of decent rates and stable employment) means more competition among buyers which means those buyers will likely write more losing offers prior to getting into contract, and pay more once they do. Meanwhile, a market like the one we just saw in fall was rather dull as these things go, but meant that if a buyer did see a product they liked and could afford and weren’t trying to time the market or make sure they had a chance to see peak inventory, that they could likely get a “deal” perhaps even at a lower price than asking and without having to compete with others—aka experience an “easy” side of real estate. And so on, in all manner of ways.
The Market: Forecasting the Future (Don’t!)
First off: I have a much more numbers-centric version of this coming out in the form of cut-and-dry market news next month, so if you’re not into this particular brand of fluffy forecasting I get it, and you can check back in mid-January.
Secondly: I don’t believe in trying to time the market, nor that you should; the “right” time to buy or sell is when it makes sense for you, and your life circumstances.
That said, I’m anticipating a “strong” start to 2025 market-wise, in the sense that we’ll generally see more activity and willingness to commit all around than we did this past year.
I’m not an economist, finance is not my field—but I spend a lot of time with market stats, and more than anything, I know people. I’ve been in this business, while not as long as many of my very esteemed peers, for long enough to know there’s only so long mass opinion or reticence will hold one way or another; our scales do not stay balanced, they are constantly in flux even in little waves within bigger cycles.
In the Bay Area in particular: there’s big money, and there’s demand. For all the very valid grievances about wealth distribution and economic disparity and frustrated affordable housing initiatives and so on, the fact remains that there are always capable buyers and ready sellers here, and who want to be here—and based on what my colleagues and I started seeing towards the end of this year, those people are largely tired of putting life choices on hold; this trend is going to continue. Our cities have ineffable qualities that make them desirable places to live even during the most challenging of times for the cities themselves, and despite the news stories that steal attention and thus serve the media best, nowhere here is truly “falling apart.”
Note that there are so many caveats to those paragraphs above, because real estate is insanely nuanced. Differences in product (condo vs single-family vs residential-income vs age vs architectural type vs quality etc), location (city, neighborhood, block), timing (default seasonality vs local conditions), and client financial profile create tons of micro-markets given the number of potential variables.
If you want to get properly into all this as we hurtle into coming months, reach out and let’s talk—it’s a fun conversation but too much to tackle in this post, or any single post really (though do look out for the quantitative companion piece to this one since at least we can underscore a bit of my proselytizing with hard data).
“What Workshop Am I In?”
To bring this back around to me, and to us, as humans: A person I know once shared that when life gets challenging, they ask themselves: “What workshop am I in?”
Aka what can I learn from this? However trying or downright awful this time in my life is, what cosmic experiment is this and what do I get to take away from it as a learning experience?
Some of the most fantastic parts of what was decidedly a learning year for me in 2024: I maintained my own standards of integrity, generosity and professionalism even on the occasions I was not met with such grace. I undoubtedly did right by all of my clients. I decided to write this blog because I was tired of worrying more about critics than connectivity! I finally learned to put myself first (…occasionally).
I joined a new brokerage and was promptly embraced by a community of genuinely brilliant professionals who make me proud to be in this industry, whom I’m excited to learn from, and who make me feel decidedly less alone.
I’m heading into the new year with a profound sense of excitement—with a healthy dash of motivating fear—and a renewed capacity to (try to) effect change and optimism in the world if just in small personal acts of rebellion against doomscrolling.
I’m excited to continue work with my existing and past clients, to meet new clients, and to meet new people in general. I’m not a chaser, I’m a resource; I love discovering what people are looking for and whether we might be a good fit to work together. If so then we’re off to the races, which is an absolute treat but not the end-all-be-all of my job (as I see it anyway), because even if our time together is a single conversation, I’m always glad for the opportunity to cross paths with a new perspective and hopefully impart my own.
I'm looking forward to being brave and charging ahead.
What workshop were you in this year? What are you looking forward to carrying with you into 2025?
In the End
Finally, if you’re the dire type and this whole essay has done nothing for your pervasive existential dread, and frankly you’re just not quite sure why you stuck this read out or what this blog even is, consider considering my end-all-be-all failsafe belief, born of a lifetime reading speculative fiction and dystopian literature in which holding onto humanity and making moments mean something amid a backdrop of horror and nihilism are the only things you can and must do:
If nothing matters, then everything matters.
Make it count, friends. Don't let fear dictate choice. As my enlightened colleague Steven says: protect your yeses.
I’ll see you next year.
Yours,
Analise
