I became licensed as a REALTOR® at the end of November. I got some systems set up in December and wrote handwritten cards to over a hundred of my friends and associates, then took the second half of December and first half of January off for the birth of my son. Since getting going it took me 34 days to get to 120% of what I now consider to be a full client load and still deliver what I consider to be great service.

It’s time for me to revisit my business plan and make sure I’m ready to deal with what I think is coming.  This book is helping to transform how I run my business, both as a REALTOR® and an investor. Rework is changing how I look at the Real Estate industry, and how I achieve the goals I’ve set for myself and my family.

For the next several weeks I’m going to do shorter posts reflecting on the chapters of Rework. The book itself is a series of very short (1-2 page) stories, making it very readable and utterly brilliant. To quote from one of the reviews (emphasis mine):

Its 270 pages are mostly white space and tangential illustrations;you get about 100 pages here. It doesn’t go into any depth, simply skimming the surface of very many different notions. Nothing here is new, it is 80% common sense and you can read most of it for free on the Signal vs Noise blog.

And yet I highly recommend buying and reading it. It will only take you a few hours and will enrich your business life. Why? Because you are stupid.

Its okay though, I’m stupid too; we are all stupid. We constantly forget what we know; we backslide; we lose courage. We listen to overpaid overfed corporate execs and their ghost-writers and don’t listen to what our sensible grandmothers tell us, and heck those grandmothers would never have let the economy go crunch.

So we need books that remind us what we already know to be true, and reiterate it a distinctive and friendly way so that remember it for a little while longer than normal.

This book does this so well that it sets the benchmark for slapping yourself in the face. Along the way it reminds you that you wasted several hundred dollars on wordy business books that told you what to do and how to do it, by authors who did a 180 a couple of years later.

If you don’t already own it, I’d suggest getting a copy, following my posts and also checking out their Signal Vs Noise blog. You can buy Rework on Amazon in hardcover, paperback or audiobook.

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Hi, I’m Chris. I buy three-bedroom townhouses in Millwoods.

That’s my niche. You may have met my Dad, Brent. He’s the King 82nd Street. (That’s over here)

If you’re going to do anything, you need to define your niche. Where, what, how, why, where, and what makes you different than your competition.

To that end, Peyman Aleagha wrote a great piece for the Geek Estate Blog about developing and working a niche online.

I’m not talking about online competition or SEO, but more generally about your real estate investing business.

Just as an example, you might say you invest in residential real estate. If you’re like me, you can refine that to say you invest in positive cashflow, long term investment residential real estate. But there’s still a bunch of possibilities.

• Single family homes
• Townhomes
• Condominiums
• Foreclosures
• Neighborhoods, subdivisions or areas
• New homes for sale
• Downtown condominiums
• Suburbs
• Acreages

Define a niche, and become an absolute expert in it. Know the neighbourhood and everything about it. That dosen’t prevent you from investing in other areas or types of properties, but it’s only by focusing and learing that you’re going to succede.

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