Ethical Homes

It’s pronounced “REE-uhl-tohr”, with the final vowel sometimes experiencing schwa reduction; despite what many people seem to think, it isn’t pronounced “REE-luh-tohr” or “REE-uh-luh-tohr”, although the latter mispronunciation is now common enough that it has become a traditional example of epenthesis.

“Realtor®” is actually an invented word, created by the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) in 1916 as a way to distinguish their members from other non-member real estate agents. In order to emphasize that distinction, the NAREB trademarked the word, and later renamed themselves as the National Association of Realtors (NAR). One of the requirements that the NAR has for all of its members, then, is that we help them avoid trademark dilution (the process by which trademarked words become generic terms, like “kleenex” and “xerox” and “post-it”) by putting the ® symbol after the word. (Technically, we’re actually supposed to write the word in ALL CAPS and use the symbol after every instance of the word (i.e. “REALTOR®”); thankfully, NAR isn’t as anal as some other trademark holders, and so they allow Realtors to use more traditional capitalization and to only use the ® after the first instance of the word in a particular text if doing otherwise would be unwieldy.

An emergency, as its name implies, is simply an emergent situation—one that is currently unfolding. Emergencies don’t have to be unexpected, they don’t have to be urgent (that is, requiring immediate attention), and they are often not extremely important; most people assume that all emergencies are all three of those things, however, which results in a lot of wasted effort trying to cope with them. An offer coming in on a house is an emergency, for example, but depending on the circumstances it might not be urgent—if there is no expiration on the offer, and the seller who has received it has other viable offers already in, then it might be acceptable to them to wait to act on the offer.

Contrast that with a crisis, which comes from a Greek word meaning “decision”; like an emergency, a crisis doesn’t have to be unexpected, but it does require an immediate decision of some sort—it is an urgent situation, and usually an important one. That same offer with no expiration, then, could become a crisis if the seller does not have any other offers in and the buyer has become antsy after waiting for a response.

Understanding this difference is very important when managing a real estate transaction, for both real estate agents and their clients; when everyone involved is on the same page as to what is important and urgent as opposed to just emergent, everything goes much more smoothly. As much as possible, then, I try to be explicit about how I view a particular situation in terms of those traits; if you’re ever unclear about what I think of a situation, please don’t hesitate to ask.

EST5EDT is the time zone that covers the majority of the eastern United States of America. It is mostly identical to the “EST” (or “Zone R”, for military types) time zone, but where that time zone is always 5 hours behind GMT, EST5EDT switches between 5 and 4 hours behind GMT due to Daylight Savings Time; technically, in the U.S., EST only refers to that portion of the state of Indiana that does not follow Daylight Saving Time.

If all of this is boring you, just check before you call to see what the current time is in some cities where I often find myself.

(All times here are EST5EDT.)

For Sweth, regular business hours are from 11am-6pm on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday.

For the staff at the Keller Williams Realty Tysons/Vienna office, regular business hours are 9am-5pm Monday through Friday, 10am-5pm on Saturday, and 10:30-5pm on Sunday.

For the staff at the HomeFirst Mortgage Old Town Alexandria office, regular business hours are 9am-5pm Monday through Friday.

Note that these aren’t the only times that I or the KW or HFM staffs are working; those are just the times when we are most reachable. When necessary, appointments can be arranged outside of those times, and of course in case of true crises we are always available.

Prior to getting into real estate, I spent many years working as a technology consultant, and actually got my start in IT by creating some of the first secure global intranets on the web. Every instinct in me, then, wants me to spend loads of time enhancing this site with every whiz-bang piece of technological wizardry out there, and twice that much time tweaking the layout so that every last pixel is in the right place.

One lesson I learned during my years in IT, however, was that it was very easy for a talented programmer to overengineer a solution, spending hours building something that nobody had ever really asked for. When I left the world of IT to work in real estate full time, then, I made a conscious decision to NOT overengineer this site, and instead put up something very basic, and wait for my customers and clients to request features before adding them.

Not unsurprisingly, I’ve received almost no requests for a prettier site; many of my customers, in fact, have appreciated the simplicity of the site and the resulting speed with which it loads. Instead, at my clients’ request, I have spent the majority of my time improving the site in ways that allow them to gather information, make decisions, and take action more easily.

Sometimes this means that I put in placeholders for future features or information; if you find one of these and wish that it were more than just a placeholder, just let me know, and I’ll try to get something up as soon as possible. (Similarly, if there’s some other tool or functionality that you want to see on the site, or even if you do happen to wish that the site were a little prettier (I do know that it currently looks very ugly when viewed with certain web browsers, for example), please drop me a note and I’ll see what I can do.)