cocktail | Easy Money

Real estate agents work very hard and deal with a wide array of emotions on a day to day basis. Sometimes, it’s an hour by hour basis! Sometimes, we need a little something to unwind, or to perk up, or to celebrate, or to drown our sorrows in. Basically, there’s always a reason for an agent to need a drink, so here’s the top ten list of drinks for real estate agents.. Drink responsibly!

1. The Broker Blues – The time when you don’t have any pending deals. You’re feeling sorry for yourself and wondering why the hell you work in real estate.

Ingredients:

½ oz. Blue Curaco

½ oz. Vodka

A squeeze of lime juice

Shake with ice and strain into a shot gloss. Repeat, as necessary.

2. The New Listing Lemon Drop – When you get a new listing and you’re feeling your inner Superhero coming back, baby!

Ingredients:

1 ½ oz. Vodka

½ oz. Triple Sec

1 tsp. sugar

1 tsp. lemon juice

Maraschino cherry

Mix Vodka,Triple Sec,sugar,and lemon juice in a cocktail shaker half-filled with ice; shake well until sugar is well blended. Pour strained liquor into sugar-rimmed martini glass and don’t forget to garnish with a cherry on top! Note: To create a sugar-rimmed glass, take a lemon wedge and rub the rim of the glass. Dip the edge of the glass into superfine sugar.

3. The Red Hot Realtor – You’re dominating the market. You have homes flying off the streets and clients lining up wanting your help. You’re on fire! This drink is simple, because you don’t have time to make anything complicated.

Ingredients:

1 8oz. glass of 7-up

1 shot of Fireball Cinnamon Whisky

4. The All-Nighter – You’ve had a long day. You spent hours on the phone and computer pulling comps, setting up showings and answering calls and emails. You have offers to respond to and draft, and you know you’ll be up late tonight. The All-Nighter drink has your back. It’s also simple and knows you don’t have the time to measure and bust out a ton of ingredients.

Ingredients:

Red Bull Energy Drink

1 shot of Captain Morgan’s spiced rum

1 shot of orange juice

5. The Home Wrecker – The day the inspection or appraisal kills the deal. You need something STRONG! Also called the Long Island Iced Tea, this is one of the strongest and most alcoholic drinks ever created. It’s also delicious. It also helps take away your anger, bitterness, and extreme sorrow!

Ingredients:

1 shot of vodka

1 shot of rum

1 shot of tequila

1 shot of gin

1 shot of triple sec

1 lemon wedge

Coke

Fill a cocktail shaker with ice and add the spirits and the juice from a squeezed lemon and shake like hell. Pour into a tall glass, add ice and slowly pour the coke on top of the ice. The less coke you add, the better you will feel.

6. The Double Agent Dance – This is when you’re acting as both the listing agent and buyer’s agent. You know you have a lot of work ahead of you, and that it requires a delicate dance. This drink is also known as The Dancing Goldfish.

Ingredients:

1 bottle of white wine (chardonnay or white zinfandel are best)

12 oz. of 7-Up

12 oz. Peach Schnapps

1 can of mandarin oranges

Over ice and in a large pitcher, pour in wine and peach schnapps. Stir in mandarin oranges and 7-Up. Serve in tall glass with ice and watch the fishes dance! Keep refilling to keep the fishes alive!

7. The Orgasm – When you’ve worked so long and so hard, and given all you can, and you finally get the satisfaction of a job well done. The build-up has been intense, and then… you get an OFFER! You explode with relief!! Also known as a Screaming Orgasm (if the offer was all cash or over asking)! There’s no better feeling in the world. 😉

Ingredients:

1 oz. Bailey’s

1 oz. Kahlua

1 oz. Vodka

1 oz. Amaretto

Makes one shot. Can be doubled for a Multiple Orgasm.

8. The Hail Mary – When you have a deal hanging by a thread and you need that one last burst of energy or negotiation super power to get the deal done. This is when you need your Hail Mary, also known as a Bloody Mary.

Ingredients:

1 ½ oz. vodka

3 oz. tomato juice

1 tbsp. lemon juice

½ tsp. worcestershire sauce

3 drops of tabasco sauce

½ tbsp. horseradish

salt, pepper

Mix everything together and pour into a tall glass. Garnish with lemon or lime wedge, celery stalk, green onion, pickled green bean, rotisserie chicken or anything you have laying around the kitchen.

9. The Superman – It’s closing day! You did your job, did it very well, and made it look easy. You finally got your hard-earned paycheck and saved the world for your client. You feel like a Superhero, and if this isn’t your drink of choice, then a beer will never taste better than after a closing! Cheers!

Ingredients:

1/2 oz Stoli Blueberi vodka

1/2 oz Absolut vanilla vodka

1/2 oz Bacardi white rum

1/2 oz Malibu coconut rum

1/2 oz Blue Curacao liqueur

1 1/2 oz pineapple juice

Cranberry Juice

Sprite

Fill shaker with ice and add all of the alcoholic ingredients and pineapple juice and shake till frothy. Pour mixture into a tall glass, then add a quick pour of Sprite and top with a splash of cranberry juice. This will layer red, white, and blue into the glass and will rejuvenate your super-hero powers!

10. Love Potion – When your happy clients refer you to a friend or family member and you get to start all over again, and your love for the wacky world of real estate is renewed.

Ingredients:

1 oz Grey Goose Vodka

1 oz amaretto almond liqueur

1 oz peach schnapps

1 oz orange juice

1 oz cranberry juice
Pour ingredients into a shaker with ice, shake and serve on the rocks. Now get to work and go party!

by Sarah D’Hondt | Broke Agent

The rise in rents and home prices is adding additional pressure to the bottom line of most California families. Home prices have been rising steadily for a few years largely driven by low inventory, little construction thanks to NIMBYism, and foreign money flowing into certain markets. But even areas that don’t have foreign demand are seeing prices jump all the while household incomes are stagnant. Yet that growth has hit a wall in 2016, largely because of financial turmoil. We’ve seen a big jump in the financial markets from 2009. Those big investor bets on real estate are paying off as rents continue to move up. For a place like California where net home ownership has fallen in the last decade, a growing list of new renter households is a good thing so long as you own a rental.

The problem of course is that household incomes are not moving up and more money is being siphoned off into an unproductive asset class, a house. Let us look at the changing dynamics in California households.

More renters

Many people would like to buy but simply cannot because their wages do not justify current prices for glorious crap shacks. In San Francisco even high paid tech workers can’t afford to pay $1.2 million for your typical Barbie house in a rundown neighborhood. So with little inventory investors and foreign money shift the price momentum. With the stock market moving up nonstop from 2009 there was plenty of wealth injected back into real estate. The last few months are showing cracks in that foundation.

It is still easy to get a mortgage if you have the income to back it up. You now see the resurrection of no money down mortgages. In the end however the number of renter households is up in a big way in California and home ownership is down:

Source: Census

So what we see is that since 2007 we’ve added more than 680,000 renter households but have lost 161,000 owner occupied households. At the same time the population is increasing. When it comes to raw numbers, people are opting to rent for whatever reason. Also, just because the population increases doesn’t mean people are adding new renter households. You have 2.3 million grown adults living at home with mom and dad enjoying Taco Tuesdays in their old room filled with Nirvana and Dr. Dre posters.

And yes, with little construction and unable to buy, many are renting and rents have jumped up in a big way in 2015:

Source: Apartmentlist.com

This has slowed down dramatically in 2016. It is hard to envision this pace going on if a reversal in the economy hits (which it always does as the business cycle does its usual thing).

Home ownership rate in a steep decline

In the LA/OC area home prices are up 37 percent in the last three years:

Of course there are no accompanying income gains. If you look at the stock market, the unemployment rate, and real estate values you would expect the public to be happy this 2016 election year. To the contrary, outlier momentum is massive because people realize the system is rigged and are trying to fight back. Watch the Big Short for a trip down memory lane and you’ll realize nothing has really changed since then. The house humping pundits think they found some new secret here. It is timing like buying Apple or Amazon stock at the right time. What I’ve seen is that many that bought no longer can afford their property in a matter of 3 years! Some shop at the dollar store while the new buyers are either foreign money or dual income DINKs (which will take a big hit to their income once those kids start popping out). $2,000 a month per kid daycare in the Bay Area is common.

If this was such a simple decision then the home ownership rate would be soaring. Yet the home ownership rate is doing this:

In the end a $700,000 crap shack is still a crap shack. That $1.2 million piece of junk in San Francisco is still junk. And you better make sure you can carry that housing nut for 30 years. For tech workers, mobility is key so renting serves more as an option on housing versus renting the place from the bank for 30 years. Make no mistake, in most of the US buying a home makes total sense. In California, the massive drop in the home ownership rate shows a different story. And that story is the middle class is disappearing.