The Gold Coast Standard and Darien Real Estate

Riddle:When is Buying a Computer Like Buying a Home?….Darien Real Estate

Last week I bought a new laptop.My old one was slow, riddled with viruses, and the keyboard ws missing the letters “N and”D”. It was time.

Against the advice of my “Machildren” I decided  on a PC . It has a large,shiny,black screen, lots of memory and a keyboard that looks like it came straight off the Space Shuttle. 

Anyway,once out of the box,I had to figure out how to transfer data from the old machine to the new one. “Simple enough,”I thought. After all ,I had a tool they called,”The Easy Transfer Wizard.” With the wizard, your computers do a cyberdance and files and settings are transferred-magically .

Twelve hours, one sleeve of Chips Ahoy cookies, and a pint of Rocky Road ice cream later,I found myself  in the fetal position on the kitchen floor.I didn’t need the Transfer Wizard anymore.I needed Harry Potter.

Instead,I called Microsoft, Hewlett Packard ,Optimum Online and my fourteen year- old second cousin.  No one could figure the problem out. I gave in to despair when they all started to suggest I call the others.

The very next day,I paid a consultant to come over and pull my head up off the kitchen counter.It turns out I had a bad “router”.(You probably thought that was a power tool. I did.)

Through all of this,it occured to me that conveying property and setting up computers have something in common.Here’s how.

Statistics show that people buy  new computers every three to five years . Likewise, they buy or sell property every 5-7 years. In both cases the impulse is to think,”Hey,I’ve done this before. No problem”. 

It would be true except that computers and real estate are both changing at the speed of light.  New technology, pricing, marketing,and regulations create a dynamic  that most of us just cannot keep up with. Still,many people think they know  all about real estate- just like I believed in The Easy Transfer Wizard.

Take my advice.If you’re looking to set up a computer,call someone knowledgeable . If you’re looking to buy or sell a property,call the best Realtor you know.

 I promise it will keep you off the kitchen floor.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 12:59 pm and is filed under Buyers, Sellers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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