I sold my last house in the autumn of 2023. It was valued at near $2M. My commission was 2%. It turned out to be a $37,000 paid day. Good time to quit real estate. Go out on top.
I hadn’t really realized that I quit real estate. I didn’t mean to retire. Here’s how it happened.
Being Canadian, most of the real estate activity happens in three months - March, April and May and I had gotten into the habit of leaving Canada in early November and returning in late January knowing that I wouldn’t be missing much during those slow slow winter months. Winter was a time for marketing and I could do that from anywhere.
I had been slowly scaling back my marketing. My Christmas and anniversary card list was getting shorter every year as I knocked off clients that I didn’t really want to keep in touch with. (The plan was to retire in three to five years.) I also stopped adding new clients to the lists reasoning that I would be retired by the time they wanted to sell and/or buy again.
And then by mistake I deleted the list altogether. Whoops. I could have rebuilt it but at that point it was Autumn of 2024 and I was in Taiwan for what turned out to be six months so… I took it as a sign.
Truth is, if the real estate market was as crazy like it was in 2021 or even 2017 I would likely not be retired now. Real estate is so much fun (and easy and lucrative) when the market is white hot. However, when I returned from Taiwan in the spring of 2024, not much was happening and I just let retirement wash over me. I farted around in the spring and summer, not really working. I did some showings and open houses but my heart just wasn’t in it. One of my websites - a real estate news site, I let the web hosting expire. I stopped pay attention to real estate news… I just sort of evolved into retirement, like the air going out of a tire.
That’s how I retired.
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