Last year Bridget and I sponsored a Blogathon for Hunger, which, interestingly enough, raised no money online even though it was a blogathon, and raised a little bit of money offline.

This year I’m returning to the scene of the accident to see how much money I can can raise for this year’s Hunger Walk, sponsored by the  El Dorado County Food Bank.

I was feeling pretty badly about the donations a couple of hours ago.

What a difference a couple of hours make.

Last year online we raised $0.  This year thanks to the generous donation of New York Realtor, Laurie Mindnich (blog) — not only did we raise more than zero dollars, we reached our goal of raising $200 for the El Dorado County Food Bank.

But we don’t have to stop there.  Let’s see if that donation form still works if we go past our goal.

Remember, the El Dorado County food bank contributes $9.00 of food for every dollar in cash donations they receive.

Thank you, Laurie Mindnich, and congratulations on your achievement award! 

It seems to me lately that a lot of the discussion among the inhabitants of that distant place, the “real estate blogging community”, has been about the effort to try to normalize, document, and promote what they’re doing.

There are real estate blogging coaches now, with a really fuzzy and indistinct line between those who make a living heping real estate bloggers and those who just say they’re real estate blogging coaches. Meaning no disrespect to the blogging coaches who actually are pretty good and make their living at, I suppose that to the extent you tell someone that a capital letter goes at the beginning and a period at the end, or whatever you tell them, that makes you a coach.

Also noteworthy is a growing body of rules, which is quite a challenge for those of us who have to keep up with the daunting task of breaking them as soon as they come up. This paragraph is a case in point, since the first rule of real estate blogging fight club is that we deny the existence of rules governing real estate blogging fight club.

On the promotion front, you’ll be pleased to know that if your public has yet to be lured into the brilliant circle of light that shines through your prose, for a mere three hundred bucks you can get your head on the back of the blogobus, thereby letting your public know that you’re a new face of real estate and leading the way and so forth.

There’s probably no other profession in any species on any planet in the visible portion of the universe that loves vanity ads the way human Realtors® love our vanity ads.

“Look at me. My head’s on a bus.”

Don’t get me wrong, Sellsius. I admire your ability to get paid for this.

One thing I don’t get, though: Aren’t there two of you, and if so, are there two of you in one Sellsius, a sort of alchemical binary, or is there only really one Sellsius, and if so, which one gets the head that’s not his on the bus? I came in late.

What I Really Think About Poor People

I didn’t react skillfully to the beginning of the whole charity thread, days ago, before we knew anyone was going to get ahead on a bus.

The truth of the matter is I was bitter about my experience raising exactly zero dollars from the real estate blogging non-community for the winter blogathon, and getting blamed for it into the process. Also on some level, I couldn’t bear to look while it happened like deja vu all over again, with the punditocracy donning their callous indiference as though it were the fine silk of virtue. I didn’t have to wait long, either. It took about a minute, and came precisely from the expected direction, right on time, with all the annoying precision of an off-key song.

So for being a dope to Sellsius, I apologize. Twice if there’s two of you.

But seriously though, where’s my beach?

April 2, 2007, “Two Counties — No Waiting”
March 6, 2007, “Voted Amador County’s best real estate blog by people who know it’s the only one.”
January 27, 2007, finally gave in to the underlying urge to blatant self-promotion with “Goll danged great agents”
December 3rd, 2006, began the fine tradition that is this post, changing our motto in keeping with our hunger blogathon theme to “Practice Random Acts of Residential Sales”.
November 9th, 2006, launched the blog with “We can’t quit now, we still have gas money”.

We sent out the checks to the Amador and El Dorado County Food Banks today. We want to thank everyone who contributed to the Blogathon’s success, and give a special thank you to Judy Onorato at Financial Title
for making our blogathon a success.

No electrons were harmed in the typing of this blogathon.

The numbers for residential sales in Pollock Pines from November, 2005 to November, 2006 are a kind of mixed jumble that makes them difficult to characterize.

On the one hand, sales are up 50%, from twelve units sold last November to eighteen sold this November.  So looking just at November, that’s great news.  Of course, if you take the year as a whole (December to November for 2005 versus 2006), a different picture emerges, with 261 units sold in 2005 versus 156 in 2006, a forty per cent drop.  Perhaps it’s safe to say just what we noticed recently in our other writings, that buyers, lured both by bargains offered with prices falling and the recent drops in interest rates, have been coming out in droves these last couple of months.

This year’s median sale price was up 15.6% in Pollock Pines, from $360,617 last November to $416,737 this November.  Also, the average sale price was up 11.6%, from $355,792 last November to $397,217 this November.   Don’t get too excited yet, however — it turns out that a little more money bought a lot more house, with the average size of sold units growning a big 45.7%, from 1355 square feet last November to 1974 square feet this November.

As a result, when we look at average square footage, we no longer find appreciation.  Instead, we find a significant drop — of 23.4%, from November to November.

It’s hard to find much to fault with Pollock Pines’ November performance overall, however.  Given the good divisor of eighteen units sold, inventory is a modest 6.6 months.  I’m sure sellers are hoping that December and January will bring them more of the same, but we’ll have to wait and see on that one.

Well, what sort of tourist would I be if I didn’t take pictures?

(The kind who blogged video? Hey, be gentle with me, I live in El Dorado County. What do you think this is, “Silicone Valley”? Yes, people around here really do call it “Silicone Valley” half the time. I think they’re confusing it with Hollywood, but that’s a whole different post).

So anyway, during yesterday’s big Amador County Adventure, naturally I took some pictures, as proof that I’m not some guy just hanging around my comfortable den in Cameron Park, but nay, indeed, really did make it as far as the Mel’s in Jackson.

Here’s proof that at one point I was preparing to leave the safe known known (thanks, Donald Rumsfeld) of El Dorado County, in the form of my not-too-fuzzy picture of Poor Red’s:

For those of you who don’t think “Poor Red’s” is a local landmark, I once had a “floor call” from my web site in which I was asked how far a given house was to Poor Red’s. As it turns out, Poor Red’s is pretty close to where my daughter goes to High School, but it’s even closer to the turn off from Pleasant Valley Road onto route 49, which is El Dorado County’s preferred method for getting out to Amador if that’s the kind of big adventure you’re having.

So Many El Dorados, So Little Time

Poor Red’s is in El Dorado. El Dorado is a small town, so I’m tempted to say that that’s all that’s there, but that does it an injustice. Adding insult to injury, if the local folks here tend to say “Silicone Valley”, people from out of the area have a tendency to get completely confused about the difference between El Dorado and El Dorado Hills. So here’s a brief primer.

El Dorado Hills has the Serrano Country Club and subdivision, and is just west of Cameron Park and East of Folsom. Those who love it call it an “exquisite upscale community” or the like. Those who hate it are prone to characterize it as a “fashionable McMansion development.” I should say in defense against those who hate it that there are a lot of other really neat subdivisions out there with more unique custom homes, like Waterford. I love Waterford.

El Dorado has Poor Red’s, a couple of high schools, a gun shop, a smackerel of small town charm, good prices, and is just a bit west / south of Placerville.

Now, for an advanced lesson: Both El Dorado Hills and El Dorado are in El Dorado County.

Placerville is also in El Dorado County, not Placer County.

Everyone feeling OK at this point? Good.

See?

Well, as the joke handed down from my French Canadian ancestors goes, yesterday you looked, “and there we were, gone.”

No one was being vebose yesterday because we were all out selling. Actually Helen and Kathy were hard at work being verbose all day while Bridget and I were out working, each with our respective clients, in the rain, showing homes both distressed and not, and perhaps selling a couple that weren’t so distressed.

What a team.

It’s invigorating, that’s what it is. Yep, that’s right, I’m going with “invigorating”. I’m working my way through Martin Seligman’s excellent book, Learned Optimism, and even though I’m only on chapter two or so, I think it’s safe to say “invigorating” will prove a better word choice for this weekend’s activity than “exhausting”. Seligman’s book, if I’m reading it correctly, is about the scientific basis underlying the idea that optimism leads to greater success for most organisms than pessimism (duh). More profoundly, Seligman’s book puts forth the thesis suggested by the title: there is a scientific basis and framework for the idea that one can teach pessimists to be optimists.

That works for me. I’m basically a pessimist undergoing directed self study in optimism. Optimism is an essential career skill for Realtors®, insofar as our job involves subjecting ourselves to as much potential failure as we can in order to be successful.

That’s invigorating.  Trust me.

Kathy and Helen went out and played with DOD (that’s dear old Dad as he likes to be called) Saturday instead of researching statistics. But that’s not going to keep us from our blogging duties. If we’re going to blog about Amador County, then it’s high time we learned where it is. So we did a little Internet search and we discovered that there is a Wikipedia entry for it, complete with a map!

For those of you non-native Californians (and/or the geographically clueless) it turns out that Amador is located due South of El Dorado County. We’ve even been there and it is a quite lovely rural area well steeped in colorful California history. We’re talking Gold country.

We will continue our research tomorrow and I am sure we’ll have more to tell you.

Well, we’re at the halfway point of the blogathon. A lot of people have asked how they can help out.

I wish the answer were more verbose, more a propos, more au courant, de rigeur, je ne sais quoi. I wish it had something to do with how scared you are of some new web site, and how we’re all going to be fine, because consumers still need someone to hold the lockbox key and their hands.

But the answer is about the same as it was in the beginning of the blogathon. You can best help out by downloading the flier. Fill it out. Follow the instructions. If you want to sponsor someone, the smart money is on either me, because I’m longwinded and not afraid of my own unintelligibility, or the whole team. But Bridget and the Helen/Kathy combo are also chiming in and helping to move things along. In fact, the most successful aspect of the whole thing has been seeing others take their first tentative steps into efforts that will help keep me from needing a hunger blogathon. We have about 200% more bloggers than sponsors! Fortunately Bridget put her finger on it with “Blog Blog Blog“, because we’re not doing all that well at “thon thon thon.”

How much have we raised so far? Well, I’d have to go back, but I think it’s safe to say that I’ve already hit or am close to hitting the twenty posts that Judy Onorato, El Dorado County’s most Courageous and Beloved Title Company Rep, sponsored us for. So that’s forty bucks, when you throw in the matching funds. And the Helen / Kathy team are up to about four bucks. So by the end of next week, blah blah blah.

You know, this is viewer supported Internet. We depend on folks like you for this great programming.

Now I know how PBS feels. Does that stand for “Post Blogathon Syndrome?”

I won’t say I know how Sally Struthers feels, but Rob Reiner does. Lucky guy.

Well, Helen has still some funds to raise off of my sponsorship.  Go Helen!  And you guys, don’t ignore Bridget.  She’s an accomplished agent, equestrian, and bingo something-card vendor, so please don’t let her tailspin into a depression.  Let’s make this our most successful Winter 2006 Blogathon ever.

Operators are standing by.