Hey, Neighbor
When I started writing about selling yesterday, I did so to lead into a story about canvassing my neighborhood selling the idea of a gathering we are planning. When I write, I have a general direction I head off towards, but I purposefully allow myself the flexibility to wander wherever my thoughts take me. In the case of yesterday’s story about selling, I got to my daily word limit before I had had a chance to set-up my neighborhood story. So I am doing something I rarely, if ever, do, which is segue from one story to the next. Yesterday I wrote about my personal sales training from the age of eight on. It was basic door-to-door selling. Most business people of my vintage are likely to say that there is nothing more valuable as business training than selling and that the most instructive form of selling is door-to-door cold calling. I won’t digress too much about the lessons that sort of training gives you, but suffice it to say that Dale Carnegie would approve.
On our general hilltop we have 36 existing homes and four more under construction. I believe the first home was built on this hilltop about twenty-five years ago. There are about twenty additional lots of which I believe about half are owned by existing homeowners, who own them mostly and presumably for shielding their property from being surrounded too closely by other homes. Many people (including myself) probably think that owning land around you to prevent overbuilding is a bit of a waste unless you have way too much disposable and discretionary wealth. When lots go for small amounts, that’s one thing. When they increase in value to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, that is yet again another thing. This is the North County of San Diego and most of what you see when you look at the surrounding hills is open space. I know it is a more complicated issue than that since the existence of utility services in certain developments makes building practical, where it may not be in other open, but more remote spots. So, in summary, I suspect that this area will see building of at most another ten houses over my expected lifetime.
I have assessed my spot for potential conflicts and since I already have two nicely landscape-shielded homes on the North and South sides of me, that leaves the areas East and West for consideration. The Western space is pretty much safe since there is a large ravine and at best only one house could possibly be built on a small outcropping and that would be what they call a “flag lot” that did not directly sit on a road, but just had a single lane access to it. It is also far enough West that it would hardly trouble my view at all. Buying that lot would truly be a frivolous endeavor for me and even more so for a potential builder since the land is a hard “perk”, meaning that putting in approved sewage systems would be prohibitively expensive. To the East I have the protection of my front downslope and the road. That one lot that exists (the one I have bootleg planted ice plants along the road on to pretty up the roadside) is an interior lot without views. If someone did build on it, other than the construction noise and mess, it would be almost invisible from my home. In other words, its not something I waste time thinking about…usually.
We have a short, dead end street that runs about 700 feet. There are four of us on that street and two empty lots. There is the lot I described above and another interior lot that was made into a sort of park by the southern neighbors. That neighbor, Mary, was widowed five years ago (we knew and liked Mick a great deal). Mary has now decided to move to Denver to be near her son’s family. She sold her house for the asking price in four days and sold the lot to someone else subject to a successful “Perk” test, which is pending. It seems there may be a new house on the block eventually. Had I wanted to prevent that, it would have cost me $200,000 to own that little park. Not for me. I’ve wasted a lot more than that on bad investments over my life, but I like to think I have lived and learned. My sisters own a seventeen acre lot in Lansing, New York that was passed down from Grandfather to Mother to them. The taxes paid over the years on that idle raw land (and even netting out some paltry billboard revenue) probably don’t equal its current value, especially is you apply a Net Present Value analysis to it. Mary will move in a few weeks and the new owners will start their renovations and move in whenever they are ready. What happens to the park lot across the street is anyone’s guess.
Being friendly with Mary, Kim arranged to sponsor a going away party for the neighbors. She got the list of people that Mary (the first resident of this hilltop) knew. I then got the list of the rest of the people making up that forty or so cohort. Luckily, we have almost all the emails since neighbor Winston had done a road improvement project and gathered all the email addresses at that time. We were only missing a few emails form new arrivals and new in-process construction. I decided that this event, planned as a Sunday open house for three hours was the perfect occasion for us to meet all of our hilltop neighbors. In a relatively unorganized development like our hilltop, these sorts of things require a dedicated soul to take them on and advocate/sponsor them. Kim is that gal on a personal (Mary-based) level and I am that guy on a more general “Let’s meet all our whacky neighbors” level. This is our home now, and I have the time, so why not?
We were at about thirty attendees before I suggested expanding the list (something Mary wholeheartedly endorsed). We were adding as many as another thirty, but we all know that invitations like these are always subject to last-minute shrinkage, so I suspect it will be at most 45-50 people spread out over a three hour open house. That still meant Kim needs to order more platters and I need to stock in more wine, beer and soda. We will hold the event primarily in our three outdoor spaces, the Garden, the Patio and the Deck. The wide-open Kitchen and Living Room flow naturally out to the deck through big expansive opened doors. I think that will make the flow and the seating very accommodative and feel that we are literally opening our home to the neighborhood for an afternoon. Attendance at these things is probably 50% attributable to curiosity and nosiness to see another neighbor’s inner home, but we are open people and we are happy to do that.
So, I drove around to the homes where we did not have emails and took a chapter out of my YMCA mint-selling handbook by just ringing doorbells and knocking on doors. During COVID and in a more retirement-type area like this, people are almost always at home. Sure enough, I met the new folks, and after some initial fear and skepticism as to who this big guy at their remote door was (one lady came to the door at 3pm in her bathrobe), everyone warmed up. I purposely drove my white Tesla so as to establish that I was not an Amazon box thief. Once they realized that I was not selling anything or seeking donations or even serving process on them (I knew most of their names and asked if they were that person…something anyone who has been served knows is a throat-clenching moment), they all warned up and thought a gathering was a wonderful idea. They all said they would come and I even got one builder (building his own home at the moment) to say he would pass the email on to the other people in the hood for whom he was building a house (one of the other three under construction). In a week we will have our “Hey, Neighbor” gathering and get a closer look at all these folks. I already have a few great stories to tell them about my efforts to canvas the community. Maybe I should buy some discount mints and see if I can make some sales at the same time.