"The Downswings of Property and Poker"

[celtic]

You've just inspired me to go and shave my 4 week beard off. Thank you.

Am I seeing you at the weekend? What's your plans?

[Eso Kral]

You've just inspired me to go and shave my 4 week beard off. Thank you.

Am I seeing you at the weekend? What's your plans?

Haha 4 weeks is amateur in my opinion, this beauty is untouched (Amanda excepted obv) since the 1st December!


Hmmm binking a deepstack seat may mean that unless you are around Sat night and I have bust early it could prove difficult.

Plans for Saturday?

[Eso Kral]

Click to see full-size image.

4 Weeks, 5 offers and 24 viewings later and after a tweak in price to a guide price of £300,000 - £325,000 instead of the fixed £325,000 price we have in the last 48 hours accepted an offer of just under £300k for the house which is great really considering we paid £161k for it in 2009 and have spent no more than £10k on it during 5 years including the initial mini refurb.

Just gotta hope it all goes through smoothly now......

[edgascoigne]

You DTD deepstack-ing this weekend, Rich? Father and I will be in attendance and would be great to catch up.

[celtic]

You've just inspired me to go and shave my 4 week beard off. Thank you.

Am I seeing you at the weekend? What's your plans?

Haha 4 weeks is amateur in my opinion, this beauty is untouched (Amanda excepted obv) since the 1st December!


Hmmm binking a deepstack seat may mean that unless you are around Sat night and I have bust early it could prove difficult.

Plans for Saturday?

Saturday gentings, g Friday and Sunday.

[Eso Kral]

You DTD deepstack-ing this weekend, Rich? Father and I will be in attendance and would be great to catch up.

Yes Eduardo I am up Saturday and hopefully will be staying up for day2 so hope to see you both there.

[Eso Kral]

Your diary is awesome.  I wish you would post more.  Straight from the start i could relate to it.  We are the same age, same sick degens in the late 90s trying to get up the corporate ladder but loving the dirty side of gambling and getting totally balls deep into punting/massively in debt in games we can't beat when we were both clueless just for the sheer buzz of it because the corporate world at 25 was so fucking boring to us both.  One question.  Why did you think one day 'fuck me southend needs a smokehouse and i am going to set it up with a serious lump of my own cash?'  You are an estate agent.  Why didn't you think 'You know what i fancy setting up my own agency'?   No rubs intended just a serious question.  Pretty sure you will be a winner at whatever you turn your hand to business wise but i am just really interested why you want to get into this business.

Sorry bud only just re read this part.

In the towns where our offices are located I honestly do not think I could open up an office and do anything different to us and the other two good (perceived) agents in the town therefore could only really compete on cost which is not a great stategy in our industry.

I dont really think I am an amazing estate agent but build really good teams around me with good work ethics and run the offices in a good fun environment (goes back to my football dressing room days) and feel sometimes like the glue that sticks them all together as opposed to it being me that brings that much to the table.

The other reason is that I actually like having the ability to have a few fingers in different pies and if one is under performing them the others can make up for it and this is where the various passive incomes come in so currently we have my wage, Petra's photography, The Slovak shop, Swift Leaflets and then hopefully The Smokehouse and a rental property over the next few months with another couple of ideas in the background and in a perfect world over the next few years if the other bits go well I would phase out my actual work (subject to incomes etc).

There is only one town I would open up in this area and if our company went down the franchise route I would be happy to have a bit of that utilizing the brand we already have.

[Karabiner]

In less exciting news this is currently the beard which makes me look older and slightly like Saul (in before he is older with more hair) from Homeland

Click to see full-size image.

You should be able to get a few through with that look Rich.

GL

[Eso Kral]

Had a pretty good weekend all in all with the offices really busy and me nabbing a few hours off Saturday afternoon and leaving Southend at 12.15 and arriving at DTD for 3.15 before getting a seat in the deepstack as they opened a table 10 mins later with my starting table consisting of Richard Shiels (of newspaper fame) who I met at the last deeptack and have chatted a fair bit since at UKIPT London and this weekend and is a really nice young guy actually.

I dont think even he himself can believe the publicity that the family have gotten over the past few weeks and he got a certain amount of ribbing on the table when got a full double up with him 3b jamming a flop and getting a guy to call of 30bbs with a gutshot and one over with us telling him it mst be a "mathematical formula" that gets people to play like that against him

When we had spoken previously I had told him about Arbboy's rant against him which he was unaware of but had then read and enjoyed the thread in the correct spirit and he said that the Birmingham Evening mail had picked up the story which The Mail saw and decided to publish and since then the radio had picked it up and they were enjoying their 15 minutes of fame with Pokerstars putting them in their next event as a family at The Hippodrome in Feb or March and I guess with the way internet sites are going a story about a family of poker players is better and cheaper than x pro or x celebrity on a small scale to entice others to the game.  Richard I believe is starting a job in March so personally I dont think he is taking the publicity that seriously and whilst as many young people have aspirations to do something in Poker it was refreshing to see that with him it wasnt the be all and end all of his life.

The rest of my starting table was good with Ruud (confirmed top bloke) and Cupcake plus other randoms with the game played in a fun envorinment and plenty of banter/chat and I was lucky enough to chip up solidly thanks to Ruud not having a fold button hitting a few flops and then with a couple of levels left I moved tables where I was oop to Binkham, Ben Vinson and Rehfish but made a call with 5 mins to go that I have regretted since which ultimately cost us the chance of a day 2 spin up and it was a drive back down to Essex with me getting home at 3am and up 3 hours later when the clan woke up

The next week consists of work, first gym sessions in a while, some work on the leaflet business, finalising a few things on the Restaurant with the designers of the premises and brand getting their initial instructions and some spade work into a potential new venture which I will talk about another time.....

[Eso Kral]

Just received this email which means it could be my lucky day...

Attention Blacklock,

Compliment of the day I am Barrister Edwin Clark a Legal adviser to
Mr. Arthur Blacklock who died on a car accident and I believe with
your assistance we can receive the fund deposits by my deceased
client. He left the sum of (US$5.5million) with UTB BANK here in Togo.

If you want to know more, get back to me so I will give you more
information to proceed. I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely,
Edwin Clark.


I wonder how many people ever reply to them? but reminded me of this legend...

[Eso Kral]

Yesterday I went for a meeting with a client whom I have met about 10 times in the past 18 months and the 3rd time I met him at his offices a seagull dropped the most hideous amount of bird poo on me which was the first time in 20 years I had been shit on!

As we walked away from my clients office yesterday for a coffe this happened 

Click to see full-size image.

We immediately walked back for a quick wipe up of the rest of my arm and suit and walked past a couple of wino's with tenants extra in their hands who commented

"Mate you have bird shit all over you!"

with the other one piping up

"Thats lucky that is mate"

Obviously it didnt feel lucky at the time and also felt very much against the odds and I even contemplated buying a lottery ticket last night but decided not to (I wouldnt have won with the numbers I normally play) so I guess the lucky part must be that it's 100 yards from where we hopefully will be opening the venue.

Our "Great Big Mini Promotion" started today and overnight all the offices were decorated which coincides with the local papers of which we take extra pages for the duration and sing from the roof tops that if you were thinking of selling (we would expect to have an invote to a fair chunk of homes due to market share) and maybe were slightly undecided on who to use you might as well give yourself a 250/1 - 300/1 chance of winning a brand new £15'000 mini.

These are the offices

Leigh on Sea

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Thorpe Bay

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For the boys, the lovely Danielle with one page of the advert   ( they are not real Vinny in case you wondered)

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The numbers for a promotion of this sort are that we expect an uplift in instructions that will more than pay for the marketing and purchase of the car so if we take the previous promotion which was the £99 one that got flamed in the press and buyers hated and got negative comments here, the phones never stopped ringing with vendors asking "whats that £99 thing about" and then we would go and see them.

Over the past 3 years on a quarterly basis we take on approximately 50 properties per office per branch and during that 3 months we took on 69 properties per office so an overall uplift of 19 properties which as of today our average fee in the pipelines is £3725 and each office over a sample size of 20 years (plenty) will sell 50% of what we take on the market (so 9.5 x £3725 = £35387.50 and of that 66% will always go through = £23355 in income per office) and that promotion cost us £20k to set up in terms of creation, marketing, leaflets, leaflet distribution and advertising so we actually banked an extra £50k in income that we never had!

This one is costing us £25k in total so it needs a similar result and will run to the end of May with the draw being done at the end of June when the BMW Mini dealers we are partnership with open a new showroom, plus we need to ensure that anyone who tries to just get an entry in the draw and lists on the 31st May is outside of the "cooling off period" of 14 days that we have to abide by.

More news on the restaurant next week....

[arbboy]

Bird might have been marking his terrority after spotting a perfect looking new nest for the spring....

... your beard! 

Great story!  Promo looks good btw.

[Eso Kral]

Bird might have been marking his terrority after spotting a perfect looking new nest for the spring....

... your beard! 

Great story!  Promo looks good btw.

The nest is here to stay, well for a bit longer anyway and even though Petra hates it I keep telling her that everytime she mentions it it's here for another week.....

Rising property prices in Leigh on Sea hit the headlines in our local papers again this week with figures being released that over the past 12 months the average property price in Leigh on Sea had risen by £30,500 from £266,801 to £296,850 which is a remarkable increase of over 11% or £567.92 per week, with detached houses the figure is even higher with an average weekly increase of £1010.69!!

You could buy a detached house in Leigh and not have worked for a year and effectively had a job that would have paid 40% tax!!!

Obviously it's not always that easy but the bubble here just shows no sign of bursting.

Ivy has been scootering around for a good few months now as other video's I have shown on here and here she was last Friday after we parked up in town before checking out a flat we are thinking of buying and meeting some friends for lunch and she still shows incredible tekkers for a little one who is not 2 for a couple of weeks yet.

Here she is


Had a pretty wierd meeting at work today where I finally got my 2015 package nailed as Operations Manager for the three offices but having come out of there I am not sure if I undersold myself and what I believe I am worth to the company or whether it is a fair deal but I think I am just on the right end of it with the flexibility it offers for my other ventures so cannot complain although I do feel a bit sore!!

[Eso Kral]

This property below just typifies the area I live and work in at the moment!

Click to see full-size image.

This is in my road and 2 years ago a detached 2 bedroom bungalow sat on the ground and a developer we deal with bought it, knocked it down and built the two four bedroom semi detached houses that you can see with the buyers completing in May 2014 at the price of £425'000 which at the time we felt a touch toppy but as we were on a scaled commission with us getting 3% of any sale over £415k we fought even harder than we normally do to get the asking prices.

Last week we listed a lovely South backing house in a prominent road just off the seafront at an asking price of £875k and in the first 48 hours had 3 people who wanted to buy it with one of the couples being the vendors above but they needed to sell their property which we listed that evening at a guide price of £500-540k and turned our attention to getting theirs moved quickly with photo's being done Thursday afternoon.

I got back from Nottingham yesterday to find that we already had 2 offers on the house in the photo and that was wrapped up a few hours ago for an amazing 22% uplift in 1 year on a home that hasnt needed a jot of work doing to it as it was brand new!

Even I get surprised by my industry some times....


Will update on a few other things later on

[BorntoBubble]

Easy life in the South, I'm stood in a cold industrial unit trying to get it flogged. Saying that it's aaking rent is £150,000 a year. I know even in the north!