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Author: Don Reedy, San Diego, CA (page 3 of 3)

Realtor, Renaissance Man

July 1, 2009

It’s A Wonderful Life – A Eulogy from California

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Realtor, Renaissance Man

Author website

If you check out any of my social media profiles you’ll come to find that “It’s a Wonderful Life” with James Stewart is my absolute favorite of all time. Sure, I’m a Star Trek fan, a Dirty Harry fan, and lots’ more, but this movie captures the heart and soul of both an individual man, his family, and the community in which he lives. It is simply a great piece of art.

Usually I don’t think about “It’s a Wonderful Life” until December, since that’s when the movie usually plays on TNT, or the mainstream stations. But today, after seeing a clip from a financial news show with a colleague, I was suddenly dumbstruck with something that just has to get out of my head now.

It so happens that today is the first day of California’s umpteenth failure to pass a balanced budget, so it’s not as if I haven’t lived through this before. California’s budget, like those of the counties and cities that make up this Golden state, have been turning putrid for quite some time.

Some thoughts and insights have fomented and seethed in me for over a year now, and perhaps using “It’s a Wonderful Life” as an example, I can at least unleash the demons that beset my thinking on this recurring and repulsive problem.

Take seven minutes and watch the America I grew up in. It’s a wonderful piece, with a message we’ll talk about down below.

Sorry, I had to wipe some tears again. I’m a real softy when it comes to communities, straight thinking, generosity and courage.

What stuck to my craw this morning when I was forced to think again about California and its problems was the fact that our sense of community is almost gone, forfeited by years of greed, selfishness, NIMBY’s and the pervasive idea that “I’ll take all I can get, when I can get it, from whomever I can get it.”

Teri, not Dayton, of course.

Here’s the heart of my heartbreak. With schools about to lose and children losing more, medical care being shut off, community programs Read more

June 2, 2009

Open During Construction

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Realtor, Renaissance Man

Author website

Had the opportunity to drive up from beautiful San Diego to Orange County today. One of the great things about Southern California is that driving 50 or 60 miles to do something or see someone (which would have driven my mom and dad nutso) is rather routine. I just cranked up some tunes, and this morning because it was misting a bit I chose Gordon Lightfoot and all that kind of folksy stuff, and away I went.

Teri Lussier always talks about her beloved Dayton, and it delights me that she takes the time to share something that suspends the day to day real estate chatter for some homespun fireside chatter. So while driving up past Camp Pendleton today I wondered aloud how many people have been so blessed to live in a place so steeped in natural beauty, just within miles reach of the whirling world of business.

Mountains to the east, Catalina silhouetted in the overcast Pacific to the west, (yeah, really 26 miles across the sea) lying low on the horizon, and no traffic to speak of. I was filled with actual joy. Now there’s a word you don’t read much of on a real estate posting these days. But there it was, palpable and real, and filling me up as I drifted up Interstate 5 at 70 miles an hour, singing along to the music.Broadview Mortgage

Scott Schang is a mortgage broker, and really a remarkable guy on top of that. I already mentioned to you in a previous posting that I was able and blessed to meet Scott at the Unchained conference a couple of months ago in Phoenix. We’ve continued our relationship, and today I was driving up to solidify some of the ideas he had for helping me market my database of potential homebuyers.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I pulled into the parking lot of his business to find it amuck with “Open During Construction” signs, jackhammers, compressors, painters, welders, yellow tape, plastic and sandbags all around the whole business complex. I took out my trusty video camera and Read more

May 20, 2009

It’s not an EOD

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Realtor, Renaissance Man

Author website

I am stealing from myself in this posting, which I believe is okay because the message just never seems to ring loud enough for me.  Some years back I met a Marine and his wife while showing homes.  What follows is my recount of meeting them.  It’s an account I hope some of you will follow with your own stories about perhaps your own EOD encounters.

U.S. Marine Corps


I took a young couple out looking for homes today. First time we had met, and our initial introduction had been through my web site and a couple of emails.In the course of our meeting I engaged in my usual convivial chatter, finding out in small snippets where they were from, what they were dreaming, and of course, what they “did for a living.” Now an old philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, once wrote “if you label me, you negate me”, and being not quite that old, but old enough to remember and revere the 60’s, I always ask “what do you do” hoping it creates something that really takes me to the core of that person, not just to the superficial meaning of his or her life as labeled by a job.

So today I asked “what do you both do?” She said, “I’m ex-military, and he’s still on active duty.”

“What branch?”, I asked.

“I was in the Air Force”, she said, “and he’s in the Marines.”

We’re here in Oceanside, California, home of Camp Pendleton, and some of the finest young men and women in the whole world. I myself served as a Marine many years ago, but continue to find that meeting and interacting with young service people always makes me glad I live in the San Diego area where so many opportunities arise to do so.

“What do you do in the Marines?”, I asked.

“EOD’s,”, he said.

I’m looking at him, and he’s a young guy who clearly loves his gal, his country, and is not a big talker like me. So I ask him, “EOD’s….what are they?”

“Explosive Ordinance Devices,” he says. “You know, Read more

May 14, 2009

How we say_What we say_Is important

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Realtor, Renaissance Man

Author website

This is actually a post about transparency, but as you’ll see, I am not a big fan of the ‘word’ itself. The idea of belaboring a word all of you seem to take for granted came about as I was talking with Scott Schang a few days ago. We were just enjoying each other’s company, doing real work, a lender and real estate guy talking about the industry, our own ideas, sharing and laughing, scribbling notes and taking stock of the ideas that just never seemed to quit coming.

For me transparency is about saying what you want to say, showing what you want to show, sharing what you want to share, and doing it in a manner and method that is most likely to allow the reader or listener to understand. In order for that to happen the writer or creater of thoughts and ideas, facts or fictions, must decide up front HOW they will present the information.

Let me give you some examples.

Greg Swann

“I write well. I’m a tough read here, but I can be much, much more difficult to read. I understand grammar the way other people understand cars or football or cooking, and I can build perfectly valid sentences in English that almost no one can understand, much less diagram. The English language is like Jazz to me, and it ripples and rolls through my head all the time, making connections like lightning strikes that take many paragraphs to explain to other people.

Brian Brady

“I posed this question at Unchained Phoenix ‘09 and you would have thought I asked the REALTORs to walk on coals…at first. A few bright agents listened to my reasoning:”

Geno Petro

“When I awoke from my dehydrated coma and rack focused my blurry vision toward the general direction of the deactivated alarm clock on my night stand, the numbers 7:07 burned my retinas digital red. I jumped up in a virtual panic, threw on a suit and Hermes noose, splashed on a handful of Bulgari, gargled a Red Bull and Diet Coke highball and flew out the door in search of my car. Alas, God was looking Read more

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