August doldrums? No siree...

DC revolves around the Federal Government and the city is D-E-A-D in August.  Congress is on vacation. The hoi polloi usually go on vacation too.  Even the First Lady went on vacation!  Traffic is non existent, reservations are easy to book and parking is a breeze.  Usually, you can count on real estate being dead too.  Except this August, it isn't.  I'm baffled by the business cycle this year!

January was frantic.  February was slow to due to Snowmageddon.  March was decent.  April and May were insane.  In June, none of my buyers wanted to work on Saturdays.  For the first time in years, I had four Saturdays off in row.  Conveniently, it was also World Cup.  For once, it was good timing.  July was busy but two out of my three deals blew up.  It was beyond depressing.  I'm bouncing back in August and have my fingers crossed for the rest of the year.

Real estate is the strangest business!  You work evenings, weekends, and holidays.  You get frantic before every vacation.  Inevitably, you work on vacation.

There is a part of me that wishes I could turn off my phone sometimes.  Occasionally, I miss having a daily slog into an office.  (I do have an office but I prefer to work from home.)   Then I remember that I do horribly in offices and I hate office politics.  There's a reason I'm in real estate and work from home. 

I just finished a home inspection in a home where the electricity was off due to the thunder storms.  The whole block had been electricity free since 7:30am.  Clearly we have to reschedule.  We completed the outdoor portion.  It took 3 hours.  With no AC and about 8000 mosquitoes.  I now have mosquito bites on my feet, on my fingers and lots of other places I won't discuss.  Although I'm an itchy and sweaty mess, I'm still happy to do it. 

Hopefully, the busy trend shall continue into the Fall.  As I've noted many times this year, inventory is LOW.  Once again, I have clients that want to buy and I have nothing to show them.  As August begins to slide towards September, I hope we'll see an uptick in listings and more people purchasing a home.  If interest rates continue to hover at 4.3% (isn't that insane?), I think the market is going to heat up.  We shall see!