The chatterbox is silenced
You know what? I’m never stuck for things to say. I could talk for England, and I regularly do. But the last few weeks have been hard for me and I’m terrified the crappy economy has sucked the love out of blogging for me.
Now I don’t sell houses, nor do I lease them, or show them, or stage them…in fact I don’t even own one. But I’ve blogged about real estate for a good while now due to my various roles in real estate search technology companies. Because I’m not an agent and never have been, I don’t blog from that point of view. My domain as far as blogging has always been concerned has been covering British real estate news, news from the economy, the latest from the Bank of England and all that malarkey. I’ve written in the boom times and I’ve watched myself writing more and more about the bad times. And frankly, I hate it.
It’s the economy, stupid
I walk past the Bank of England on my 2.5 mile trek into the office each morning, without fail you’ll always see a bunch of reporters outside waiting to catch a glimpse of a banker crying or to do a piece-to-camera about the latest gloomy, depressing statistic. And every night the folk at the newspaper stands are shouting out ’10,000 made redundant today’, ‘No hope ‘til 2011’, ‘You may as well kill yourself, we’re all screwed’ and so on and so forth. I’m not in the States so I don’t know for sure how your national press are dealing with the economic downturn, but I can tell you that ours is outrageously obsessed.
Irresponsible reporting
The media are feeding this problem in a very dangerous way. And as a blogger, I don’t want to be one of those nasty people. I have no problem telling it how it is, ask me if your shoes match your pants and don’t be surprised if I tell you ‘hell no’. But I don’t want to feed a vicious cycle just because everybody else is. The result? I’ve become a quiet blogger.
But by becoming quieter and blogging less, I’ve not really helped the situation either. I’m sure some subscribers to my company blog are thinking ‘Oooh she’s not got much to say, it must be bad in the world of property’. So I’m going to publicly say I’m going to step up, not get beat down by the fact that most of my RSS feeds need to be read with a dose of Prozac on the side and get back on the blogging wagon.
Actually, there is opportunity here
Now is the perfect time to blog about the kind of things AgentGenius cover so bloody well every day, the tips and tricks for savvy agents, the things that can make you stand out from the crowd in a time when it matters most. The recession isn’t ‘all bad’. It will cut a lot of the crap from the RE industry, houses don’t sell themselves anymore and we can hope that the cowboys of the industry won’t survive. UK agents have always been blasted for being lazy and money hungry, now those that were always unfairly tarred with that brush can show they are innovative and hard working. And UK property has desperately needed a price correction, house prices here have been silly ridiculous for a long time.
I’m certainly not complaining that my generation will have to wise up their act either, growing up in the late nineties/noughties of has led to many having absolutely no grasp of money. A credit card? Well that’s the bank giving you free money, non? In Britain we need to learn to be frugal again, we’ve become out of control as spenders and shoppers. It’s no bad thing for us to have a reality check.
Granted, it’s no picnic
Don’t get me wrong with these last couple of paragraphs, I’m not trying to say ‘yay, a recession, wahoo!’. My other half lost his City job and I’ve started looking out for vouchers for grocery items. It’s not easy for anyone. But if the economy is kicking you blogging butt, don’t let it! It might take a bit more effort to think of things to write about, but we all know that blogging is worth that time commitment.
Oh look mummy, I did it!
So I guess this post was just to help me test the waters, it seems for someone with ‘bloggers block’ I’ve written a fair amount. Hurrah, I’m a real estate blogger again 😀
