What comes to mind when you think of the real estate industry? Is it reality shows like Selling Sunset? Shows like House Hunters where all they do is see three houses and magically always get their first pick? The annoying person you’re friends with on Facebook who won’t stop posting about the “grind” and “building an empire”? 

Before I knew much about the real estate industry, all these things came to mind. All these misconceptions made me certain I would never want to be a real estate agent. I never considered myself someone who would be good at a sales job. I’ve never had a clear idea of what I wanted to do for a career, but I have always known I wanted to help people and be in service of others. Being a real estate agent didn’t seem like…

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A few weeks ago, my grumpy old cat Gus got out of the backyard and went on a near weeklong adventure. For some people this might not be a big concern but for me it meant every day and night we were on the hunt for Gus considering he’s 16 years old, very small, declawed in the front and deaf. While it may not seem like a cat going missing in a neighborhood has a lot to do with real estate there were quite a few correlations came to mind over the week. 

First, I made the mistake at first of relying on technology with things like his microchip, Facebook posts and nextdoor neighborhood groups. I suppose this might be something that for sale by owners might think as well, such as relying on Zillow and social media to get the word out about their houses.…

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Download the May Data PDF

Video Transcript (auto generated)

 Hey, I'm Steve Volkers, and this is the Steve Volkers report of the Grand Rapids Real Estate Market Data using this fancy booklet that Big Kev puts together for us each month. This is gonna be talking about the month of April. I don't even know how to say that, Kev. It can't be. It can't be May, but it is, and the sun's out today and it's 70, so we're loving it.

So this month's data, there's gonna be a couple of themes that I'm gonna, that I'm gonna talk about. Ultimately, it is all over the place in my mind, just based on offers and what I'm doing with clients, but then also trying to figure out what the data tells us. So, My word of the week is fickle.

I should probably…

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