Please find this month's curated insights: practical real estate lessons and strategies, timeless Stoic wisdom for modern challenges, and a thought-provoking podcast on health, longevity, fitness, or biohacking — all distilled for your immediate benefit.

WEALTH:

Pricing Strategy and how it should put pressure on buyers 

If you're not wearing a watch and don't have your phone nearby, and you ask somebody what time it is, you probably have zero interest in how the inner workings of their watch actually function. That said, would you be interested in glimpsing how two negotiations played out — two sellers, completely different circumstances, completely different homes — who chose the exact same pricing strategy? Both chose to create a competitive, multiple-offer situation. No guarantees, of course. Only doing what's possible to put the odds in their favor.

Property 1

My client's mother had passed away, and he was ready to sell her home. The challenges were real — a two-bedroom single-family home, a shower-only bathroom upstairs, a half bath downstairs, a kitchen in need of a complete remodel, and overall updating throughout. During our pricing strategy call, he literally asked me — please cover young ears — "what is the sell the motherfucker price?"

My best-case thinking had him somewhere in the upper $600,000s, given a market that had lost its rhythm. My answer was $599,900.

Fifteen written offers came in. Probably another three to five buyers would have written had the price stayed that low. The seller accepted an offer from a highly qualified buyer at $700,000. Escrow closed last week, smooth from start to finish.

Property 2

This one holds a lesson not just for sellers — buyers, pay attention.

My clients were the proud owners of a stunningly updated, immaculately maintained home in a small gated community of 43 homes. As luck would have it, there were two recent sales of the same model. One sold for $1,275,000 a little over six months prior — relevant, but not heavily. The other sold for $1,295,000 just two months before my clients listed.

Market conditions always matter. This market had lost its footing. Desirable homes in the area were sitting longer. Both comparable sales had started above $1,300,000 and required price reductions and over two months to close. Comparing the homes side by side, my clients' home was the nicer of the two — so $1,295,000 became their target. But market softness added uncertainty, and my clients understood the value of creating a competitive environment. They listed at $1,199,900.

Even with that recent comparable sale in the backdrop, the first three offers landed within $6,000 of each other, all clustered right around the list price. The strategy: counter only the strongest, most motivated, most qualified buyer. In most multiple-offer situations, that counter goes out as "highest and best" — no target price given, buyers bidding against each other, best offer wins. Everyone shows their hand immediately.

Here, the approach was different. A counter went to one buyer only, at $1,298,000.

The Lesson

If you are a buyer in a multiple-offer situation — or even when there aren't multiple offers — the more you give a seller reason to send you back a counter rather than simply accepting, you are creating time and space for other offers to arrive.

That buyer took a couple of days to respond. Tick, tick, tick. They came up — to $1,280,000. Not where the seller needed to be. The seller countered at $1,285,000. Again, the buyer didn't respond immediately. Two more offers arrived, one at $1,300,000.

The seller felt more comfortable with the original buyer. The $1,285,000 counter was rescinded, and "highest and best" went out to that buyer — who had come dangerously close to losing this home entirely. They came in at $1,290,000.

Hopefully their agent — and I always give this advice — had told them clearly: nibbling at price doesn't just cost money. It creates the window for another buyer to step in and cost you the home. Fortunately for them, it didn't happen that way.

One more thing worth mentioning. We opened escrow eleven days after listing. According to my clients, a considerably better outcome than spending sixty days getting to what might have been the same number anyway.

Next month, I'll share what happens with a negotiation my clients and I are in the middle of right now. They came in with expectations somewhere around $1,300,000. They listed at $1,274,900. As of this writing, two and a half days on market — three offers in hand, and a possible fourth arriving later today.

WISDOM

Please excuse what gets said here almost every month. Beyond the fundamental lessons of how to live — how to be a good person, a good parent, a good friend, a good business person — it never stops being remarkable that people who lived thousands of years ago arrived at these thoughts. And that with everything that has changed in the world since then, not one word has lost its relevance.

When the word habit comes to mind, so do four names: John Wooden, Vince Lombardi, Nick Saban, and my business coach Steve, who played four years of professional football under Don Shula. Three of the four are football people — which is a little ironic, given that my last day on a football field was trying out for a local rec team. Got hit in the nose, knocked flat on my back, the day before helmets were handed out. Bloodied and defeated, I quit on the spot. The day before the roster came out — a roster I had apparently made before they discovered I'd quit.

There is no arguing with the success of those coaches. And what strikes me most is not the complexity of what they demanded, but the simplicity. John Wooden — ten national championships over twelve years — famously spent time at the beginning of each season, teaching his college players how to put on their socks and tie their sneakers. Yes, sneakers. Can't get the East Coast out of me. Not elaborate plays. Socks and shoes. So they wouldn't get blisters.

My coach Steve has distilled thirty-plus years of coaching real estate agents into six fundamental building blocks. He says it often: "You don't need any new ideas." Marketing, by the way, is not one of the six. Want to know his number one? Mindset. Without that, what is there to offer — to yourself, your family, or your clients?

James Clear wrote Atomic Habits. Expectations were low when the Masterclass started on a long flight — figured the first section would put me to sleep. Instead, the whole thing got watched, and then the book got read.

Clear's challenge isn't just to identify the habit you want. It's to break it down to its most simple, almost laughably small first step. Want to start running? Day one: put your running shoes by the front door. Day two: put them on. Day three: go for a short walk. You see where this goes.

So — what's a habit you've been meaning to start? Hoping this is the nudge to take that first, almost imperceptibly small step.

WELLNESS

Two podcasts worth sharing from this past month.

The first - Build Muscle, Great Posture & Resilience to Injury - is Andrew Huberman's conversation with trainer and physical therapist Jeff Cavaliere. Was hoping for deeper insights on posture specifically, because that's a personal work in progress. What it delivered was a genuinely enjoyable listen with practical, immediately applicable information. Sometimes that's exactly enough.

The second - How to get microplastics out of your body - is hosted by biohacker Dave Asprey. Hard to know how much of it will prove out. But given how thoroughly plastics have saturated our environment — and if that doesn't make you think of a certain line from The Graduate, nothing will — some of these ideas seem worth exploring.

THANK YOU!

Knowing your time is valuable, I'm grateful you chose to spend some of it here reading this month's insights. My hope is always to share something that's genuinely useful or thought-provoking. If anything resonated with you, raised a question, or simply caught your attention, and if your time allows, I'd love to hear from you.