Daily Archives: January 19, 2008

Bay Area Sales Slowdown

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Calculated Risk reported the latest DataQuick numbers, Bay Area home sales ended 2007 at a more-than 20-year low.

The numbers were down 1.2 percent from 5,127 in November, and down 39.5 percent from 8,372 in December 2006, DataQuick Information Systems reported. December was the slowest since 1988 according to DataQuick’s statistics. Sales have decreased on a year-over-year basis for 35 consecutive months.

“The median price paid for a Bay Area home was $587,500 last month, down 6.6 percent from $629,000 in November, and down 4.9 percent from $618,000 in December last year. Last month’s median was 11.7 percent lower than the peak $665,000 median, last reached in July.”

So are these bad numbers? Certainly not. The market is adjusting itself after years of unsustainable increases. Is it cause for alarm? Certainly not either. The sooner we go back to a more feasible affordability ratio, the sooner we can jump start the local economy and breath some life back in our national economy. This was to be expected. When a market goes fast up in an uncontrolled way, it will follow the counter-swing of the pendulum. These are good numbers.

On the flip side, sales in 90803 have substantially gone down while homes have somewhat appreciated. This makes sense in areas like ours. They are well sought after and offer much in terms of future investment.

Taming The Monkey Mind

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Taming the mind is something that puzzles most of us but there are tricks to make you become more and more aware.

In some of my sessions, the main thread boils down to being more aware of yourself, or in particular, your mind. The National Science Foundation concluded we have about 1000 thoughts per hour. The average thinker has 12,000 thoughts per day and a deep thinker about 55,000 thoughts per day.

Here is a little simple math equation. If most of your thoughts are negative, say 75% and 25% positive, what will happen? You will mostly have a negative mind frame. Having a negative mind frame doesn’t predispose you to positive achievements. Ultimately, what you think materializes since we act on many of our thoughts. Now, even if we rebalanced our thought patterns to 50% positive and negative, what would happen? Pretty much, they would negate themselves.

It is possible to become mindful of yourself. It is possible to become aware of your thoughts. All it takes is to make a serious commitment to remember to remember. As you start your day, every day, ask yourself to remind yourself! Remember to remember. As you continuously strive to become mindful, you will create trigger moments in front of certain situations. Say you know for a fact that given situations make you lose track of yourself, become more and more aware of them and eventually you will have created a trigger system that will remind you to slow and become more aware of your environment.

This is important to do because this way, you reclaim a certain amount of control over your automated behaviors. Once you become more mindful, you can better observe your thought patterns and filter out unwanted thoughts.

Reaching 75% positive thoughts and being aware of the rest of the 25% is a good goal to set for yourself in the beginning. Becoming more and more aware of yourself is not hard to do. The trick is to make it fun. It’s either a fun challenge or just something you want to do. Don’t stress it. Have fun with it. And remember that your thoughts are not you but a by-product of yourself. Change the mind set, change your life. Sometimes things are simple if we think about it like that.