Mike Browning

Tag: property value

  • What’s Good For The Goose…

    What’s Good For The Goose…

    It’s easy to say the right things. We all have trouble getting off the couch sometimes.

    Sometimes I need to remember to follow my own advice.

    If you’ve been reading here any length of time, you know I like to talk about how putting things off isn’t smart. It’s understandable why we do it. We’re avoiding something we think will be unpleasant. But usually we’re better off facing it now, because the unpleasantness doesn’t shrink while we wait. It grows. And half the time you find out the thing you were dreading wasn’t worth the dread.

    We all know it’s a bad idea. We all do it anyway. That includes me.

    I run another site called hiswordtogether.com. It helps people stay on a Bible reading plan that gets you through the whole thing once a year. If you’re interested, you can check it out at the link.

    When I started the site late last year, I also reserved the .net and .org versions of the name. Ever since then, up until last week, there was an item on my to-do list to point those addresses to the main site.

    It had been there so long I stopped noticing it most of the time. When I did see it, I’d think about how I needed to get it done, then immediately start getting nervous about doing it. I’m not the most tech-savvy guy around, and I’d start picturing what happens if I click the wrong spot and take all my sites and my email offline.

    Again.

    That’s happened before. Inconvenient doesn’t cover it. Support got me through it, but when you don’t know how to explain what you did, it’s not exactly fun.

    So I kept trading the low-key annoyance of seeing it on my to-do list for the sharper worry of “what if.”

    Last week I finally did it. Logged into my registrar, four clicks, done. I spent something like a hundred times more effort avoiding it than it took to just do it.

    Nothing in my life is visibly different now, except I feel a little silly.

    I bring this up because I see the same thing happen with landowners, just about a different kind of click.

    You know it’s smart to have a read on what your land is worth and what’s happening around it. You’re probably not selling anytime soon, maybe not ever. But you also know that not knowing is its own kind of risk, the kind where you find out too late that something changed.

    What stops people isn’t the info. It’s what they think asking for it will cost them. Call an agent for “just some information” and a lot of them hear that as an invitation to start walking you toward a listing appointment, whether you asked for one or not. So people skip it. Same as I skipped four clicks for months.

    That’s what the MBR Land Reality Check is for. It gives you real market data, a heads up on what’s happening nearby, and whatever else might be relevant for your property.

    All without pressure to list, or having to sit through a buzzword-filled presentation. And it can be requested in a couple of minutes, or less time than it took me to fix my domain issue.

    Here’s the link.

    PS – if you’re not ready for the MBR Land Reality Check but like reading these articles, you can sign up below to receive them via email:

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  • The Big Deal Isn’t Harder

    The Big Deal Isn’t Harder

    Don’t spend your whole life playing penny ante games.

    Early in my career I spent months working a deal. Drove the area, ran the comps, found the right buyer, got it closed. Made about a thousand dollars on it.

    I was working with my dad at the time, so he saw all of it. The driving around, the dead ends, the slow grind toward a buyer. He told me I’d done everything right, worked it the way it should be worked. Then he told me something I didn’t fully get at the time.

    He said it isn’t any harder to work a big deal than a small one.

    I argued with that a little in my head. Surely the bigger deal has more moving parts, more zeros, more ways to mess it up. More people who’d notice if you got it wrong.

    He was right and I was wrong. (Don’t tell him I said that.) The work is close to identical. Find someone who wants to buy, someone who wants to sell, put them together and get something done that leaves everyone better off. What changes is the number at the end, and that number doesn’t ask you to do anything different to get there.

    Most of what makes the big version feel harder isn’t the deal. It’s you. You start adding weight to it that isn’t actually there. Bigger feels like it should require more, so you tense up, slow down, second-guess yourself in ways you never would on something smaller. The deal didn’t get harder. You did.

    It applies to most things, and most people never test it. Making two hundred thousand a year isn’t meaningfully harder than making forty. It’s a different set of habits, different deals, different conversations, but it isn’t five times the effort or five times the stress. People assume the bigger number requires being a different kind of person. Mostly it just requires not getting in your own way at the size you’re currently working.

    People spend years circling the smaller version of something because it felt safer, only to find out later the bigger version asked the same of them. If not less. They just hadn’t been willing to find out.

    PS- Most landowners aren’t thinking about a deal of any size today.

    But the ones who do well, big or small, tend to be the ones who stopped sizing up the work before they’d even started it.

    That’s what the MBR Land Reality Check is for. It looks at nearby sales, current listings, development pressure, and the details affecting value that aren’t obvious from the road.

    Is it a bad idea to know where things stand?

    Get Yours Here

    PPS- If you’re not ready for a Reality Check but enjoy reading about land, markets, and negotiation, you can sign up below and get these posts in your inbox.

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    By submitting, I understand I will receive marketing emails and blog posts from Mike Browning Realty and/or associated companies. Unsubscribe at any time.

  • Not Ready to Sell?

    Not Ready to Sell?

    Good. Look Anyway.

    Most landowners aren’t thinking about selling. If anything, they’re thinking they never will.

    They’re at a 1 or a 2 on a 10-point scale. If that.

    But life comes at you fast. Kids going to college. Estate planning conversations you weren’t expecting. Something happening nearby that changes how you feel about owning land there. We’re seeing that a lot right now, data centers, crypto mining operations moving into rural areas. Things that weren’t on anyone’s radar two years ago.

    You can go from “I’m never selling” to “I wish I’d sold last year” faster than you’d think.

    So it’s worth having a baseline. Most people agree with that in theory. Most people still won’t do it.

    Because the last time they asked a question like this, they ended up in a conversation moving faster than they wanted to move. Some agent walking the property, running numbers, and applying list-now pressure that would make a timeshare salesman blush.

    It’s uncomfortable.

    So they wait. Market shifts. They finally get serious two years later with worse information than they would have had if they’d just asked the question when they first had it.

    That’s an expensive way to stay comfortable.

    The landowners who make good decisions are almost never the ones who acted fast. They’re the ones who started paying attention early. Understood the market before they needed to. Weren’t scrambling when the time came.

    That takes time. And it starts before you’re ready.

    Looking doesn’t mean selling. Getting a clear picture of what your land is worth, what’s selling nearby, where development pressure is headed, none of that commits you to anything. It just means you’re not guessing when it matters.

    The only thing that makes early conversations uncomfortable is working with someone who treats them like a sales call.

    That’s not how I operate. If you’re at a 3, I’d rather you know where things stand than stay in the dark because you were worried I’d push you somewhere you weren’t ready to go.

    You control the timeline. That part is on you.

    My job is simply to make sure you have the information when you’re ready to use it.

    PS – Most landowners aren’t planning to sell today.

    But things can change quickly. When the time comes, the people who already understand the market tend to make better decisions.

    That’s what the MBR Land Reality Check is for. It looks at nearby sales, current listings, development pressure, and the details affecting value that aren’t obvious from the road.

    Is it a bad idea to know where things stand?

    Get Yours Here

    PPS– If you’re not ready for a Reality Check but enjoy reading about land, markets, and negotiation, you can sign up below and get these posts in your inbox.

    Register to Receive Posts Via Email!

    By submitting, I understand I will receive marketing emails and blog posts from Mike Browning Realty and/or associated companies. Unsubscribe at any time.