If You Want to See Things Clearly, You Need to Get the Right Angle

Summer time, being the basketball off-season, is the time for officiating camps. A few weeks ago I attended a great camp that I have gone to for the past few years. It is put on by my college conference supervisors, and the knowledge that I gain there every year has proved most valuable as I continue in my officiating career. Every time I hear something interesting in camp, I always wonder how it might also help me in my career as a REALTOR. Something I recently read prompted me to think back to one of my recently learned officiating lessons. . .
Michael Cook, a contributor at the BloodhoundBlog, wrote an interesting post regarding what industry people are saying about a likely timeframe for a real estate market recovery. His post was interesting to me because it provided differing perspectives on the national real estate market. The reason that his post made me think of basketball officiating is because both real estate analysis and basketball officiating rely heavily on “perspective” for success.

Successful basketball officiating, at its very core, is about perspective. In officiating, we refer to it as “getting the right angle.” No matter how well you know the rules, if you have a bad angle on a play, you can’t see it, and you are doomed to fail. Typically, the reason that a call is missed in a game is not because the official is incompetent, but because he or she usually failed to get the best angle on the play and couldn’t possibly see it entirely. The proper perspective is paramount to officiating success.

Perspective is equally important in real estate. This is especially true when you are talking about analyzing the real estate market.  As the popular saying goes, “all real estate is local.”  This means that what may be true in one area isn’t necessarily true in another.  It is a matter of your perspective.  I imagine that if I started talking to a REALTOR from New York City, we would have different takes on the current state of the real estate market because of our different perspectives.

Perspective is an important thing to think about when sifting through real estate advice or analysis.  You need to know the perspective of the person doing the analysis.  Is this person a builder? an investor? a REALTOR? Where is the person located geographically?  All of these questions help establish a person’s perspective.  Once you can do that, you can look at their opinion through the prism of your own perspective.

Know the perspective, get the angle; doing this will give you a much more complete picture of the issue at hand.

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