Housing recovery takes another blow as pending home sales tumble

Jason LangeReuters

Contracts to purchase previously owned U.S. homes fell by the most in more than three years in September, a sign that a softer economy and a rise in mortgage rates are hurting the country’s housing market.

The National Association of Realtors said on Monday its Pending Homes Sales Index, based on contracts signed last month, plunged 5.6 percent to 101.6, the fourth monthly fall in a row. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast a slight increase.

Mortgage rates have risen sharply since May on bets that the U.S. Federal Reserve would soon begin winding down a stimulus program, although rates have eased slightly in recent weeks.

Many investors believe the Fed will keep its bond buying stimulus at full throttle given recent signs the U.S. economy lost a step in September.

The number of newly signed contracts to buy homes was at its lowest level last month since December. It was the largest one-month drop since May 2010, when a home-buying tax credit was expiring, an NAR spokesman said. Contracts fell across all four major regions tracked by the realtors’ group.

The U.S. housing market, which was battered by the 2007-09 recession, had appeared to turn a corner early last year when home prices began to rise again.

By: Jessica Stillman

As anyone who has ever pulled an all nighter in college or basically lived at the office to get a product launched can tell you, for most of us deadlines are quite motivating. Having that big red circle on your calendar coming closer and closer is the only way to get yourself towards meeting the goals you’ve set for yourself, right?

Not really, suggests a thought-provoking recent post from entrepreneur James Clear. While time pressure may have a place in driving you to overcome that final hurdle to an important achievement, Clear argues that if you really want to accomplish more, you need to swap schedules for deadlines.

What he’s advocating isn’t meandering around aimlessly with no specific end date in mind, of course. Instead, Clear advises we focus less on that endpoint and more on the process to structure our time. If we fixate on where we want to get to and “don’t magically hit the arbitrary timeline that we set in the beginning,” he warns, “then we feel like a failure -; even if we are better off than we were at the start. The end result, sadly, is that we often give up if we don’t reach our goal by the initial deadline.” So what does he suggest instead?

In my experience, a better way to approach your goals is to set a schedule to operate by rather than a deadline to perform by. Instead of giving yourself a deadline to accomplish a particular goal and then feeling like a failure if you don’t achieve it, you should choose a goal that is important to you and then set a schedule to work towards it consistently. That might not sound like a big shift, but it is.

The complete post walks you through what this looks like day-to-day, using diverse goals from exercise to writing. It doesn’t matter what you’re trying to accomplish, the same principle applies, he writes:

Productive and successful people practice the things that are important to them on a consistent basis. The best weightlifters are in the gym at the same time every week. The best writers are sitting down at the keyboard every day. And this same principle applies to the best leaders, parents, managers, musicians, and doctors.

The strange thing is that for top performers, it’s not about the performance, it’s about the continual practice. The focus is on doing the action, not on achieving X goal by a certain date.

If Clear has convinced you that you need to spend less energy setting goals and more setting practice schedules, then the next logical question is how to get the most out of all that practise. It’s a question for which psychologists have answers, including being deliberate in how you approach practice and making sure you get plenty of rest.

Are you too obsessed with end points and not enough with regular practice?

By Kevin Daum

LinkedIn is constantly changing. Here is a current list of 20 proper ways to build your network without offending or embarrassing yourself.

More and more LinkedIn looks like the winning social media tool for business networking. Whether you are trying to grow your reach, find content, explore opportunities or recruit talent, this virtual meeting place is for many the first and last stop. You’ll do well to really explore the depth of resources on LinkedIn so you can more easily build and manage a powerful network. But features are constantly changing and your behavior must adapt. Even some good ideas can become annoying to other users very quickly.

Below is a list of 20 dos and don’ts to keep you current and well-liked among the LinkedIn crowd. Ignore them and you’ll be blocked and made a pariah. Follow them diligently and you can meet wonderful people and propel yourself down the path to networking success.

Do treat your profile as your professional brochure. Use an appropriate-looking profile image and put in complete and up-to-date information. This will be your first impression for many.

Don’t blanket connect. Before you ask for a connection, learn about the candidate. Be ready to explain why they should connect with you.

Do choose your groups carefully. Pick the ones most relevant to your interests. Feel free to jettison any that don’t yield fruit.

Don’t tout connections that you don’t really know. Just because you are connected with someone doesn’t mean that person is willing to vouch for your credibility. The truth will always surface.

Do be active in your groups. Post thoughtful responses to the most interesting discussions.

Don’t be self-indulgent. If you start a discussion or post a link, give value. Obvious self-promotion impresses no one.

Do get intentional testimonials and endorsements that speak to your actual skills.

Don’t let your profile sit inactive. Even if you only post an update once a week, keep it alive.

Do link meaningful videos that help people understand the value you have to offer.

Don’t use old or broken links, or, even worse, links to personal sites that detract from your image.

Do use the project section in your profile for references, and remember to include project or publication URLs.

Don’t copy and paste links for profiles from your browser. Those links are long and cumbersome. Every profile has a simple public link (found under the picture) that looks like this: www.linkedin.com/in/kevindaum

Do show potential connections that you are thoughtful and worthy by crafting a personal message that starts a relationship. People will admire that you cared enough not to use the standard “Join my network on LinkedIn” message.

Don’t spam. It seems obvious, and yet I am still amazed at how many people I have to block. Show respect and use the Update feature to get your message out.

Do reach out and make meaningful connections. Take the time to find common ground based on your profiles and consider how you can bring reciprocal value.

Don’t create verbiage combinations that no one understands. No Strategically powering visionary organizations to develop their potential untapped enlightenment. Make an effort to use simple language and recognizable business terms that actually mean something.

Do give a detailed description of what you do in the top of your profile. Just giving your company description under your title makes people think you have no idea what your position entails or that you just don’t care.

Don’t hog the conversations in groups or make it your personal soapbox. You should always consider others and bring value with every post.

Do write meaningful recommendations for people. Stop thinking you are participating in a meaningful way by endorsing others. Few find value or even pay attention to the annoying endorsements. A friend of mine created a joke skill on his profile. Within a week, more than 30 people endorsed his bowstaff skills.

Don’t treat LinkedIn as a chore that you have to just to keep up. This is the best networking tool available today, and it’s absolutely free. Dedicate real time and effort to make the most of your connections, and you’ll establish worthwhile, long-term relationships.

KEVIN DAUM is the best-selling author of Video Marketing for Dummies.
@awesomeroar

Mass. towns fend off family housing – Massachusetts families with young children may find it harder to find housing as towns push developers for more 55-plus communities and apartment complexes with only one and two bedrooms, Scott Van Voorhis writes. A lack of family housing is a way for towns to reduce budget strains by avoiding the need for more schools, Van Voorhis writes. Telegram & Gazette (Worcester, Mass.)

Lawyers: Quake-susceptible communities should have master insurance policy  – An HOA board in California wants to ditch a community earthquake insurance plan and have each resident purchase their own policy, but such an approach wouldn’t cover the community in a time of disaster, lawyers Donie Vanitzian and Zachary Levine write. Associations are best protected with a master earthquake insurance policy, but residents should also carry individual earthquake policies because having double coverage will help communities rebuild if a natural disaster strikes, Vanitzian and Levine write. Los Angeles Times (tiered subscription model)

Homeowners protest rent increase – Carrying signs and armed with determination, residents of the Westwood Village active senior home community staged a rally Saturday, protesting rent increases they say threaten their economic security. Richard Robinson, the community’s homeowners association chairman, said monthly rent has increased nearly $200 in the last decade, since Equity Lifestyle Properties purchased the community. According to a Westwood Village news release, the monthly rate will be raised $21 to $432 next year, up from $382 in 2010 and $249 in 2002. (Standard Examiner)

State, county laws are ‘taxing’ on HOAs – Columnist Barbara Holland takes a break from her HOA Q&A format to talk about recent county taxes local homeowners associations are facing. In a Nevada legislative session that produced some “taxing” new laws for associations, here comes some more taxing laws that could affect your association’s bottom line. (Las Vegas Review Journal)

Understanding voting rights in a cooperative – Q&A with Condo Advisor, Howard Dakoff. Issues incude: voting rights, cooperative rules, bylaws, common space usage. (Chicago Tribune)

by Elizabeth Grace Saunders

An internal battle rages inside many high performers who advance from positions where they thrived as individual contributors to positions that require them to depend on others. On the one hand, they pride themselves on knowing more than anyone else about their area and like feeling confident in their abilities to deliver exceptional work. On the other, the scope of their new responsibilities no longer makes keeping up on all the details possible —or even preferable.

If you find yourself taking on an increasing number of projects and/or people, the only way to regain a sense of control is to, paradoxically, let go of control: let other people help you. This requires facing fears like, “Maybe everything won’t be done the way that I would have done it.” Or “Maybe I’ll need to defer to someone else to answer a question instead of immediately knowing the answer myself.” It also requires redefining control from “knowing every detail off the top of my head” to “having the right level of big picture perspective to make informed decisions and the right systems in place so that I know when it’s time to check in with someone or when I need to take a next action.” And it requires redefining competence as “helping others to do great work,” instead of “doing great work all by myself.”

Here are four steps to put this mindset shift into action to achieve a greater sense of peace and control and empower those around you:

1. Carefully evaluate what only you can do. If you keep having responsibilities added to your position — such as more people to manage or more projects to oversee — you will hit overload unless you were previously working below capacity. (You can determine whether you have in fact reached that tipping point in “Stop Work Overload by Setting These Boundaries”.) To counterbalance these added time investments, you’ll need to carefully examine what only you can do by asking yourself these questions:

       Could someone else complete this work to an acceptable level?

       Could someone else do part of this project?

       Could someone else do the initial draft so I only have to review and “tweak” it?

       Is this work keeping me from my highest value activities?

2. Defer early and often. Deferring is different than delegating. Delegating is handing off your responsibilities; deferring incorporates delegating, but also involves passing activities on to another appropriate party before they ever hit your to-do list. This requires deflecting random tasks that really should fall in someone else’s court — even when you could help. For example, if someone asks you an IT question when there is a full-time IT department on call, kindly direct them to the Help Desk. Or if someone questions you about a project of which you’re no longer a member, refer them to someone currently on the team. Or if you’re invited to attend a meeting where you may offer some insight but other attendees could probably offer something similar, consider not going.

Don’t volunteer yourself for additional activities if you already can’t accomplish your must-do list. If you’re used to doing it all and pride yourself on being able to figure everything out, this will feel uncomfortable. You might even feel like you’re not being a team player. But in the end, deferring tasks others could do shows respect for others’ competency and lets you have the capacity to get done what only you can do — which is what your team really needs.

3. Create simple follow-up systems — and rely on them. When you have delegated or deferred items where you have accountability for results, having systems of follow up plays a critical role in your ability to rest assured that work will get done.

To make sure this happens, you need to have two items in place: 1) A consistent location to capture outstanding activities from your current projects. 2) A consistent routine for checking them.

A consistent location could be as simple as a Word or Excel document in Google Drive or a task list in Outlook for each member on your team. For a greater level of sophistication, you could use a task management system like Asana. In terms of when to check on these tasks, you could do so during a weekly planning time where you go through the status of all projects; during a recurring meeting with the responsible individual; or at the appropriate time before a deliverable is due. In order for you to trust the system, make sure that all of the delegated items go into your recording location and that these check-in times live in the appropriate places on your calendar.

4. Resist taking back control. Once you start to let go of control, inevitably there will be a time when something doesn’t get done in the way that you would prefer. Your gut reaction will lead you to blame yourself for letting go — “Why did I ever let anyone else do this?” – which typically manifests on the surface as anger toward or frustration with others. But instead of immediately putting the work back on your agenda, transform this situation into an opportunity for learning. First, evaluate whether you could do anything differently in the future. Second, help the people who did the work understand what they need to know to complete the work successfully next time. Often you don’t know what went wrong until you really dig in. Finally, remember to focus on your own highest-value work — instead of letting fear of letting go keep you from making the greatest contribution to your organization.

Elizabeth Grace Saunders is author of The 3 Secrets to Effective Time Investment: How to Achieve More Success With Less Stress, a time coach, the founder of Real Life E Time Coaching & Training, and the author of The 3 Secrets to Effective Time Investment: How to Achieve More Success With Less Stress.

By Jessica Stillman

When it comes to conflict, most of us go one of two ways. Some of us avoid disagreement, pushing down our anger and hurt and suffering in silence. Others thrive on conflict, working themselves up into a self-righteous lather that wouldn’t be out of place on a cable news program. It can feel so good to be so right when the rest of the world is obviously full of fools.

But it doesn’t take a lot of self-reflection to see both of these approaches have serious downsides. Repression has solved a grand total of zero business challenges and is murder on your mental and physical health. Self-righteousness has never been a great means to a constructive solution (and, frankly, can be addictive).

So what’s a better way? To get somewhere in an argument you need to stop thinking about how right you are, and spend some time squeezing your metaphorical feet into the other person’s shoes.

Julie Zhuo, a product design director at Facebook, took to Medium to share five hard but incredibly important questions you should ask yourself during an argument. Among them:

Can I fairly articulate the other person’s point of view?

If my first inclination during our disagreement is to call up a friend and begin a rant with, “He’s bat-s**t crazy. I                         have no idea why he’d say/do that, clearly he’s smoking something or he maybe he just possesses the IQ of a snail” — it’s a sign I have absolutely zero context on why you’re doing what you’re doing and have not stopped to think about it or ask you. So instead of overdramatizing the 2,395 ways you might be insane, why don’t I try and understand what’s actually making you tick?

Now, there’s a chance that even after more extensive research, the conclusion doesn’t change — said person is, in fact, crazy or low-integrity or possessing of a puny intellect. Fine. Then proceed accordingly, and don’t give up the good fight.

But those are the rare, rare cases. Generally, people are good. And smart. And acting in a totally reasonable way. Most of the time, when you dive in deeper, what you’ll find is that you were lacking their perspective. And had you known what they knew, or seen what they saw, you too might have ended up with their opinion.

You can’t even begin to resolve a conflict unless you understand why the other side thinks the way they do. So put some effort into figuring that out before you start questioning their mental aptitude.

Everyone, in other words, has a perspective, and you’re not going to get anything useful out of a conflict unless you spend some time at least trying to figure out what the other’s person’s is. It’s a point Peter Bregman settles on as well in another insightful post for the HBR Blog Network, noting that the key to a useful discussion about a disagreement is taking the time to acknowledge the other person’s perspective:

Always start the conversation by acknowledging how your actions impacted the other person. Save the discussion about your intentions for later. Much later. Maybe never. Because, in the end, your intentions don’t matter much.

What if you don’t think the other person is right — or justified — in feeling the way they do? It doesn’t matter. Because you’re not striving for agreement. You’re going for understanding…. Your job is to acknowledge their reality — which is critical to maintaining the relationship.

Is doing what Bregman and Zhou are advocating easy? Of course not. “We’re so focused on our own challenges that it’s often hard to acknowledge the challenges of others. Especially if we are their challenge and they are ours. Especially when they lash out at us in anger. Especially when we feel misunderstood,” writes Bregman, who offers a trick to make it easier: “While they’re getting angry at you, imagine, instead, that they’re angry at someone else. Then react as you would in that situation.”

This might sound a bit like something you’d hear from a marriage counselor, but both these posts are from business experts, which hints at why this advice is not just for couples but for small business owners. Your staff, customers and associates may not be as important to you as your spouse, but maintaining good relationships with them is as important to the healthy functioning of your business as maintaining a respectful dialogue with your significant other is for your relationship.

It may feel good to be right when you get in a conflict with someone at your company (hey, you may even be right in the end), but it’s probably much better for your business to spend some of that mental energy figuring out why they’re right in their own eyes.

Jessica Stillman is a freelance writer based in London with interests in unconventional career paths, generational differences, and the future of work. She has blogged for CBS MoneyWatch, GigaOM, and Brazen Careerist.

By Shannon Atler

Picture this: You’re at a conference, waiting to hear a speaker whose talk you’ve been looking forward to for months. As you sit down, you realize that he appears rattled and is gripping onto the lectern for dear life. He begins to talk, ever so slowly.

You wait a while to see if his talk improves but it becomes decidedly boring. Now you’re dreaming of a coffee break. If this sounds familiar (or if you’ve been in that position), there’s hope. No matter whether you’re presenting to an audience of one or to a crowd of 100, these tried-and-true tips will ensure you’re ready to roll the next time you present.

1.Start with a bang. During last year’s Tropical Storm Isaac, I was rerouted on my less-than-favorite airline. All went smoothly, at least until I emerged from the plane, uh, bitten. I was a little panicked upon discovering that a few sneaky little critters had apparently been my seatmates, and airline personnel were, well, unconcerned. What did this get me? A great opener for future talks on customer service, to be sure. Get started by thinking about the everyday things you do. Grab your audience’s interest with a story, quote or an interesting bit of information at the start and they’ll stay with you for the long run. It works every time.

2.Get focused. You’ve gotta start somewhere, and every plan needs a roadmap. To stay on track, outline, outline, outline. Decide first what your message is, why your audience wants to hear it, and how you will reinforce it. Then determine how you’ll sequence your thoughts: for a 30-minute talk, having four or five main points is ideal. Consider using an outline composed of talking points; jot down keywords as reminders of what you want to discuss. I like to use a whiteboard; it allows me to see all of my ideas at once, giving me a better picture of my story. You can use paper, index cards or your smartphone, but do it.

3.Know your audience. Who are you there to talk to? Whether you’re talking to a potential client, a team of employees or a huge group, knowing what your audience is looking for can make a world of difference.

4.Know your stuff. Unless you’re an expert at improvisation (or your name is Jerry Seinfeld), don’t depend on winging it. Your ship will sink faster than the Titanic if you don’t know your material backwards and forwards. Do your homework and make sure your material is solid before you get in front of the crowd.

5.Weave in examples. Think of examples as the golden thread that will tie your presentation together. People want to learn from your experiences. It’s much more valuable if you can use stories or examples to illustrate and support your points. They want to hear about what has worked and what hasn’t worked. Try it, and see how your topic comes to life!

6.Don’t read. Have you ever seen a presenter read every slide? Nothing can kill a speech or meeting faster than if you read your material. People can do that for themselves. It’s your job to fill in what’s between the lines and tell them the real story.

7.Have a Plan B. When I first spoke overseas, I was at the mercy of my host. He alone had my presentation slides on a CD and he alone was late. He finally arrived and I gleefully popped the CD into my laptop, anticipating my first slide on management. Instead, out came Russian folk music. It’s true; you just can’t make this stuff up. What were my lessons learned? Always carry a duplicate of your presentation. Things can, and do, go sideways at the most inopportune times — a delayed client, a missing audio visual guy, even a power outage. Decide in advance what you’ll do if something does go amiss. No matter whether you’re presenting a proposal for new business or preparing for a panel, having a backup plan pays off.

Shannon Alter is president of Alter Consulting Group where she helps managers and companies succeed by developing the skills they need to provide client solutions. Be sure to join the discussion on Alter’s blog at AlterConsultingGroup.com.