Even if you knew all the rules, they’d still change. Do your best.
It doesn’t happen every time, but when people get a valuation from me, it’s pretty common for them to ask something like:
“What do you think it’ll be worth in two years?”
The short version of my answer is always the same: “I don’t know.”
If I did know what was going to happen in the future, I’d probably be doing something else.
Most people want decision-making to feel like blackjack. You get your cards, the dealer flips theirs, and you can run the numbers to figure out the “right” play. The uncertainty is contained — there are only so many cards in the deck, and if you know the odds, you can act with confidence. You might still lose, but at least you made the correct move.
(The real correct move is “don’t play blackjack in a casino,” but that’s beside the point.)
That’s how most of us treat life. We think if we just gather enough information, we can make the perfect decision. Buy here. Sell there. Wait until rates drop. List when the market “stabilizes.” As if God handed us a rulebook and said, “Play this right and you’ll always win.”
(Actually, He kind of did — but it doesn’t apply to the short term as much as far as winning.)
But life isn’t blackjack. It’s poker.
And poker’s a whole different animal. You don’t know what anyone else is holding. The “optimal play” depends on information you can’t have — what cards are left, what other players are holding, how likely they are to bluff, and what they’ll do if you push hard.
And unlike blackjack, poker isn’t you against the house. Other people have agency. They adapt based on what you do, and what they think you’ll do. The “right” move isn’t fixed. It shifts based on incomplete information and moving targets.
Even worse, it’s really like playing poker without knowing all the rules. You’re pretty sure a flush beats a straight, but then there’s some weird side pot you didn’t even know existed, and the guy next to you just announced you’re all playing Omaha now.
That’s real estate. That’s business. That’s life.
You never know all the variables. You never get all the cards face-up. You think you know your odds, but you don’t control the other players. You don’t control the Fed. You don’t control whether a better buyer shows up next week or if a road expansion gets funded next year.
Yes, we can say values have risen in the past, so they probably will in the future. And we’ll probably be right. But not always. It’s not linear. After the S&L crisis, there were properties that sold for less than the commission paid on the prior sale. They’re worth more now, but timing is everything — and you can’t know the timing.
And yet, most people want to make decisions like they’re sitting at a blackjack table with perfect information. They freeze until they “know what’s going to happen” — which usually means they freeze forever.
The best decision-makers don’t waste time pretending they can eliminate uncertainty. They accept it. They move forward knowing they’ll never have perfect information, and they focus on managing risk instead of avoiding it.
We’re all making decisions under uncertainty all the time — we just forget until the stakes feel high. You can’t wait until the whole picture is clear. It won’t be. The job isn’t to know the future. It’s to make the smartest move you can with the cards you’ve got, knowing you’ll never see them all.
Because the truth is, you’re playing poker. You just keep acting like it’s blackjack.
And when I say you can’t wait to know everything, I’m not telling you to “sell now.” What I’m saying is this: once you think it might be time, and the best info you have says you’re right, don’t freeze up. That’s when it’s time to go.
Getting the right info starts with knowing what the current market looks like. It doesn’t cost anything, and it can only help.
Is it ever a bad time to start that process of knowing what you can?
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