#55 - Is the worst of it behind us for the property market?
What I’m Reading
Easily my most revisited book: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. When I get caught up in day-to-day stresses, nothing else helps me ground myself as well as this book. It seems like I’m not the only one, according to Wikipedia, it’s former US president Bill Clinton’s favourite book and one former US secretary of defence carried throughout his deployments.
Resource of the week
With each year that goes by, there are more and more nifty tools that help you achieve things that traditionally were only possible if you were a programmer. One of these that I have been using for around 2 years is Zapier, the premise is it allows apps to ‘talk’ to each other. Want Gmail to automatically send out an email every time Google Sheets is updated? Or sync newsletter lists. Or share Instagram photos to Twitter, it’ll do it all for you. It has compatibility with around 5,000 apps, and recently, notably ChatGPT integration! Really is incredible what you can do now with readily available tools.
Quote
Discard your misperceptions.
Stop being jerked like a puppet.
Limit yourself to the present.
Understand what happens - to you, to others.
Analyse what exists, break it all down: material and cause.
Anticipate your final hours.
Other people's mistakes? Leave them to their makers.
Marcus Aurelius - Meditations
News and trends
At the end of last year and early part of this year, there was a lot of talk from the media about a crash in 2023. Now things have settled, what do the figures look like?
Well, looking at the extreme ends of the Hometrack report, it’s clear that year-on-year growth is down in nearly every case on the towns/cities list. However, it’s far from crash territory. Activity is increasing with more buyers and sellers returning to the market.
In a lot of areas like house prices and mortgages, the reality is not turning out as bad as the market expected. In particular, we could be seeing drops in mortgage rates towards the end of the year which could help stimulate the market.
- As AI tools become an increasingly prominent part of our lives, it brings other issues, such as privacy. This week, Samsung engineers were caught out inputting proprietary software into ChatGPT and more concerningly, ChatGPT had to get taken down temporarily as there was a bug which allowed users to see the chat history of others.
- I’ve been complaining about landlord licensing schemes for ages. In principle, they are a good idea, but in reality, councils do not police rogue landlords who don’t bother signing up, so it becomes just a way of raising revenue from landlords who follow the rules. Nottingham council gets called out for ‘cash cow’ schemes.
My Videos
Thoughts
This week, the focus has been on pushing out the handwriting class for the end of this month. I always seem to underestimate the time it takes to put a class together. From beginning to end, it’s looking like it’s going to end up taking 3 months which is about the average time it has taken me in the past. I had hoped to do it in 1.
Sometimes I do get to the point where I just feel like dropping it and moving on to something else, but then I remember that a lot in life is about being consistent and showing up. Managing our expectations and taking every small step as a win. Falling in love with the process.
I try to take this approach with the gym, content creation and most other areas of my life. Not looking too far ahead, getting a small win every day and trusting it’ll add up and compound.
Are there any hobbies/interests/side hustles you’re working on? I’d love to hear about it, just hit reply for any feedback, questions etc!
Have a good week.
Hans