Get your imagination going

Our brains are amazingly powerful. The impact of visualisation on performance and outcomes is a fifty-fifty split of weird, and awesome.

So when it comes to thinking about a different way of doing property, it’s worth imagining what it could look like, before getting stuck down the rabbit hole of how difficult it is to make it happen.

Imagine something like this:

• Everyone has guaranteed accomodation.

• The cost of having a roof over your head is stable, for everyone.

• We generate less waste.

• We use less space.

• We connect more.

• We grow food.

• We share food.

• People who aren’t related, and don’t look alike are connected.

• We’ll live longer.

• We’ll live better.

• We’ll be more connected with the land.

• …

Let your own imagination run wild and see where you end up.

Plan B: Still people

The thing is, when you make your success based on your people, you end up working to support them to succeed. And the the back-up plan turns out to be the main plan: If our people don’t work out, they’ll work it out.

Plan A: People

It often seems like we rely on people to pull things off if the main strategy fails. People are our Plan B.

If we’re underwriting our success with our people, why not just make them the Plan A in the first place?

When you stop and listen, you never know what you might discover

We all want to be heard. So we focus on talking. But what we need to learn is how to listen.

The old chap who lives next door has several stories to tell, if you’ll stop when you’re putting your rubbish out.

The dairy owner around the corner could probably teach you a thing or two about all sort, if you found out what his background was, and what he’s interested in.

Your kid probably knows what’s going on at school, and what needs to change for them to do better.

And maybe, if you listened to yourself, you’d learn something about how you think that you might not be aware of.

Listen. Connect. Learn.

Experts aren't the solution

If the experts could solve the problem, don’t you think they would have already?

An expert is someone who knows the connections between input and output. They understand the system, and they know what levers to put to make the widget.

If there was a solution to the property system that the experts knew, don’t you think it would have appeared by now?

Perhaps we need to listen to someone other than the experts.

In this situation, we usually need to listen to whoever we think of last. Or even better, the people who don’t even make it onto the list.

Sure, the solution includes the experts. My point is that it includes all of us.

The label does not maketh it so.

Just because Shakespeare said it (or at least, wrote something similar) doesn’t make it true.

Just as a strategic plan isn’t strategic because that’s the heading on the slideshow, a home is affordable because you label it as such.

Just helping out

Just the other day, I saw something which made me stop in my tracks and think.

A friend was doing some work on their house. They’d had new windows installed in their weatherboard home, which included replacing some of the boards. Being good DIY folk, they were finishing the job themselves.

Now if you’ve never had to do maintenance work on a timber weatherboard home, you may not appreciate how gnarly this is. Everything is either finicky, or just plain hard work. Especially scraping paint off the old weatherboards, one board at a time.

Anyway, my friend had another mate helping him, and they spent most of the morning working on it.

And then…

Just after lunchtime, they were starting to paint, and their neighbour wandered over, and starting to paint with them.

Amazing.

Neighbours helping each other.

Just helping out.

Same same, but different

It’s mind boggling to pause and think that every single person walking around on the planet right now, every person you pass on the street, each one of your colleagues, every person in your family is living in a world that is a rich and complex yours. Each of us has a unique perspective and a unique experience of the world we live in.

This isn’t a new idea, but it can be profound if you let it sink in.

What can take the mind-melting-ness to another level, is when you realise that we each affect each other, and so our stories intermingle.

Imagine two people walking through an open home. They’re the only people in the house. They will have a different experience of the home. Not just because they walk through each room in the house in a different sequence, or that they have different aesthetic preferences, but they have a different history, different needs, and have come from different days. All of this affects our experience of a home.

If truth is paradox, then it is certainly true that we are all different, which makes us all the same.

Blend it all together

What would you do with this opportunity:

• There’s a social housing complex on the same block as a preschool.

• There’s two houses between them.

• The preschool also has a lot of off-street car parking.

• It’s in a residential neighbourhood.

• And the number of elderly and homeless keeps increasing.

My guess? You’d blend it.

Success is making it through

We often think that success means reaching the top. Being the best, and everyone knowing it. Making the most money, or having the most awards.

There are only so many categories to be the “best” in, and only so many things to have the “most” of.

But success isn’t for limited number of us, it’s for all of us.

Sometimes, success is getting to the end of something and still being there. Sometimes, success is starting something. Or perhaps, success might be not doing something. 

Essentially, success is overcoming something.

Is our property system as success because the house prices keep increasing? Is economic growth our definition of success?

Perhaps, the success of a more ethical, sustainable, and equitable property system would simply be that it exists. 

Food first, front and centre

It’s a close call to say which is the heart of the home: The fridge, the stove, the kitchen table, or the pantry.*

Either way, it’s food first.

But the face we present to our neighbours, the front of our home is usually more like: A garage, a fence, a hedge, or some pillars**.

What about putting food first on the face of our houses?

There’s a few ways we could do this (for starters): A half-height fence with raised garden beds/planter boxes along the street front, a vegetable garden instead of the front lawn, an openable kitchen window directly onto a street with our coffee machine immediately next to it, or a bee-friendly flower garden***.

What would you rather see when you’re walking down your street?

*I might also accept a fireplace, but they’re still much better with a liquid in hand. Don’t you dare bring the television into this.

**One of my favourite things is two-storey pillars on the entrance to a 200 square metre home.

***I don’t think this is too long a bow: bees are essential to food production. And they make honey.

Coffee over meetings

Why does catching up for a coffee sound so much more appealing than having a meeting? How come a long meeting is cause for disgruntlement and groans of pain, while an afternoon spent with friends doing nothing but talking is the sign of time well-spent?

Clearly it isn’t talking that’s the problem, it’s how we’re talking.

Making space to connect is important in all relationships, whether you’re together at a specific moment in time for a singular functional purpose, or you gather on a weekly basis. Take a little time to connect. A two hour meeting might achieve more than two one hour meetings if you spend the first hour connecting.

Next time you catch up for a coffee, make notes on how you prepare, how the catch-up felt, and what happened.

And the next time you run a meeting, treat it like a coffee date.

Connect.

Margins, profit, and just doing a good job

With a long supply chain, nearly everyone’s a middleman. Everyone’s trying to make a profit and justify their contribution to the final value.

What can happen though, is that the profit margins compound to the point where at the end, the total price looks more like 50% profit margin (throughout the supply chain) or even more.

I think there’s two options here:

1. Try and own the entire supply chain. Then you have the ability to reduce the retail price by 10% (a massive undercut) but still retain (say) 80% of the overall profit.

2. Stand at the end of the supply chain, and do such a good job you never have to do fix-up work. Charge people for the work you do on their project, and don’t ask them to cover the projects where you blow-out the budget.

Realistically, a benevolent monopoly is unlikely to occur. So if we wan’t to make an impact on affordability, our opportunity is to jump in and just do it properly.

As the saying goes: if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. Let’s not twist this into: Any job’s worth doing if it maximises profit.

Risk or opportunity

It’s generally true in business that the same thing can be seen as a risk, or an opportunity. The trick is to find the perspective that allows you to see the potential.

There are many traditional risks in property. Here’s a few that I’m aware of.

• Overcapitalising.

• Buying the best house on the street.

• Buying outside of the right school zone.

• Buying with other people.

Now ask yourself: Where do I need to stand to see these as opportunities? How does my perspective need to shift?

The biggest risk

People talk about individual risk profiles. About a personal appetite for risk. About quantifying risk.

There’s a few issues though:

1. We’re all terrible at estimating risk, so matching a personal level of comfort with a perceived level of risk is likely to bare little connection with reality.

2. Even if an expert is able to accurately define the risk for us (eliminating our estimation issue), we’re not great at understanding what the real impacts will be.

3. The biggest risk is often then you don’t see coming.

In decision-making, the biggest risk is that your assumptions are wrong. And the most devious assumption to get a handle on are the one that make up the untested aspects of your particular worldview, the aspects that have been handed to you or shaped by your environment.

When deciding which house to buy, what are you assuming?

1. That house prices will always increase?

2. That overcapitalising is a bad idea?

3. That the decile rating of the local school is important?

4. That the view of anyone else matters?

5. That you can afford it?

Looking across the horizon

It’s good to spend time imagining what is just out of sight. What’s around the corner. What’s just over the horizon.

We can get stuck in busy-work - you know, attending to the cruft of life - and forget to engage our imaginations to dream of “what if”.

Imagine what could be just across the horizon, if:

• What if we all worked part time?

• What if no-one owned property?

• What if we all owned everything?

• What if we didn’t have private cars?

• What if we shared vehicles with our neighbours?

• What if we lived on the same street for 30 years?

• What if we lived with other people?

• What if we had a smaller house?

Of course, some of us spend all our time looking towards the horizon. Some of us even spend time climbing mountains to see further. If you’re standing on Everest, you can (theoretically) see over 300 kilometres, around 70 times farther than you can when standing at sea level.

But the grandest view is available to all of us, no matter where we’re standing. Just look up.

See the stars? Now you’re seeing millions of light years away.

Today's observations of newly-minted suburbia

Today I did many things, here’s two of them:

1. I lay on the grass in the sunshine.

2. I walked through a relatively new subdivision (new enough there are still empty lots and houses under construction).

Consequently, I’ve found a answers to yesterday’s question:

What are the assumptions that go into house design?

While yesterday I was more interested in the actual technical assumptions, today’s observations led to some more tongue-in-cheek conclusions.

I can’t be sure, but it seems that when designing a house, we seem to assume that:

1. Everyone needs a double garage, even though they park their cars outside.

2. All doors except the front door (although sometimes including the front door) must be separated from the street by a fence. Preferably a solid, six-foot high fence.

3. The only people people with different aesthetic preferences are those with money.

Assuming ro-bust-ability

I just realised that the word “robust” has the word “bust” within it. “Ro-bust” is essentially “un-bust-able”.

And having gone on that tangent, now we’re here, with a question:

What makes a house robust?

I’m not a structural engineer, or a builder, so I’m not sure what the technical answer is. But I’m interested in the assumptions that a structural engineer, or builder makes when they’re making the structure (in each of their own ways of ‘making’). No-one knows everything, and there isn’t the time to everything find out, so by necessity we must make some assumptions.

What are the assumptions that go into house design?

Wood, trees & focus

Someone who “can’t see the wood for the trees” is a person who gets too focused on the details of a situation to be aware of the broader picture. To busy counting and identifying trees to take in the scope of wood/forest.

I find it a curious statement. It isn’t immediately obvious what it means (which isn’t helped by the use of the word ‘wood’, ‘forest’ is much better). And what stroke of genius hit the person who coined the phrase? And how on earth did it spread?

When we’re experts in trees, it’s hard to talk about forests. And mostly, it’s because we can’t imagine systems.

If our skill is in counting trees, we’ll struggle with the concept of connected ecosystems. If our skill is in identifying the species of a tree, the idea of seasonal changes isn’t on our radar. And if we’ve simply found our favourite tree in the forest, we can’t imagine that there might be similar, or better, trees elsewhere.

This is a lengthy analogy, but the point is simple: If we get lost in the detail, we’ll end up getting lost in discussions about the bigger system.

Our expertise is a critical part of describing the bigger system, but to integrate it we need to learn the language of the broader conversation.

• A focus on affordable housing isn’t going to solve the life-cycle environmental costs issues.

• A focus on building smaller isn’t going to solve the issue of land prices driven up by speculation.

• A focus on cohousing isn’t going to address the needs of those who have lived along their entire life.

• And a focus on houses isn’t going to connect us with the land.

The kind of person who helps people

Someone once said to a friend of mine, “I’m just not the kind of person who helps people.” Which astounded me. Because either a) that’s not particularly endearing and b) why would you admit that?

Which begs the question: What kind of person are you? And, if you’re the kind of person who helps people, how would you want to help change the property system?

If you own a house, you could:

• Buy it with other people so that you can pay down your debt faster.

• Provide cheap rent to flatmates/boarders to help them save a deposit.

• Renovate your house with more (smaller) bedrooms so that you can have more people paying less rent.

• Stay put, reduce the speculative market and connect with the community.