Changing Times

Do you feel that? The way the hair on your arms stands up? How when you get close to a wall you get a little shock? And that smell? The pungent and sweet combination of sweat and energy drinks?

Those, my dear friend, are the early signs of The Shift.

Right now only those hardened souls who daily trudge the hot asphalt world of real estate can sense the changes. Only those of us who have committed our lives and sanity to the public’s pursuit of home ownership can tell things are no longer as they were.

Soon it will be clear to everyone. In six months (once the fever has already spiked and subsequently begun to cool down)  there will be a headline on the front page of Azcentral.com proclaiming, “Phoenix Housing Heats Up”. My hairdresser will say to me, “So are you starting to get busy again?” A teacher at the Montessori I take my son to will stop me and ask if I know anything about “real estate investing” (she’ll use finger quotes). By then the knowledge will have made it to the public.

But for now it’s only you and me and the rest of the grizzled and beaten down crew who call their livelihood Realtor (at least the ones who didn’t start day-drinking back in 2009 and never stop), who know. We’ve seen the inventory drop. We’ve heard our cell phones ring incessantly. Our schedules are booked up. New clients are coming out of the woodwork. The housing market has begun to change.

We’re trying not to say the words out loud lest we jinx the whole thing, but we all have the teeny spark of hope deep down, not even in our hearts, but lower, in our gallbladders, that this will be the year it stops sucking so hard to be a real estate agent. We know it won’t be easy or stress-free regardless, but if the business and the money start flowing again, at least we won’t have the inability to pay our mortgages in addition to the exhaustion, stress-twitches and liver damage.

This time we’ll do things differently, we say to ourselves. This time we know the good times won’t last forever. If the universe will just grant us a small window of good times again, we swear we’ll save for the bad. We won’t spend our money as soon as it comes into hand. We won’t dial up our lifestyle to immediately fit the new means coming in. We’ve had it bad enough we won’t soon forget.

That’s getting ahead of ourselves, though. For now, it’s only a shift. I’m going to stock up on Gatorade to keep up my electrolytes and Febreze for the driver’s seat in my GOV. The summer’s stacking up to be intense. I’m ready for it.