More on Christchurch: doors and old people

This is another post on my recent Christchurch trip, the one we didn't go on in order to sell Bulova watches door-to-door.  See the previous post regarding what we gave away door-to-door, rather than sold.

I actually enjoyed going door-knocking.  I know it's not everyone's cup of tea, and one or two of the group found it a bit hard, I think, but that's part of the training, and the gaining of confidence.  I've probably had plenty of experience with other people's doors, over the years.  I was a Bon Brush salesman at one time, which involved a lot of door-knocking, some of it more successful than others.   (Bon Brush is now gone the way of many good firms, unfortunately.)  And I was a postman, which occasionally meant you had to knock at someone's door to get them to sign for a registered parcel, or to take something that wouldn't fit in the postbox.  And I've done surveys which required going door-to-door until you got enough people to fill your quota.  They had to be willing to answer your questions, and had to be the right sort of age, and right gender and so on in order to fit the criteria required.  That could be tough.  I remember one long, long day trailing up and down streets in Abbotsford and struggling to fill my quota because so few people were interested in responding.  Nothing to do with the fact that I was in Abbotsford; it was just one of those days.

So door-knocking is no problem to me.  And talking to strangers is something I don't have a hassle with either.  Furthermore, because we had a particular reason for being there, people were quite content to stop and talk and answer some questions about the state of things.  And in some cases that even led to conversations about God and church and such, which was fine.

I particularly enjoyed the conversations we had with old people: there was a man and a woman (in separate places) who were both 93 and had plenty to tell us about life and their histories.  The man had a boat, and a number of fairly serious ailments.  At one point he looked rather wistfully at the boat sitting in his backyard and said, "I probably won't be going out on her again."  I agreed, thinking that the fact that he had problems with his knees (he had a fall in one of the quakes) wouldn't allow him to climb up into the thing for a start.  But he was still driving to the supermarket...

The old lady was a delight even though she'd been quite badly injured in one of the early quakes: the fireplace had blown out.  She'd received singeing to her fingers, but that was just the start.  She'd been hit by something heavy and had almost lost sight in her left eye, had had a damaged hip, cracked some ribs and more.  She'd been in and out of hospital several times since.   She would have kept us talking all day, if we'd wanted to stay.  She told us how she used to have a sleep-out at the back of the house - she'd put mates of her son, who was a soldier, up in there overnight, so they didn't have to drive back to the barracks under the influence.  Sadly, people had been stealing the wood from the sleep-out after it got damaged in the quake.

Another old man had so many ailments that just when you thought he'd run out, he'd produce another one: several heart attacks, including one when he was on the operating table having something else attended to, blood in his urine, possible cancer, diabetes (which was a bit ironic, because he was one of the ones we took biscuits bake too - he said he'd sneak a bite or two in every now and then) and arthritis in his hands.  The latter had been made worse by some medication he'd been given a decade or more ago - given by someone who's now a top medical person - and which one of the other staff had noted was basically poison.  Not only did it not do anything for his arthritis, is left his hands looking as though they'd been burnt.  He was given some antidote, but that hadn't helped much.

These three people all lived on their own, which is a bit worrying when you think of the illnesses and disabilities they have.  They seemed remarkably resilient.  Another woman had had her house fall apart around her, and had been taken quickly to her daughter's home where she now lives.  She said all she could remember was grabbing some underwear out of one of the drawers.   She couldn't even recall what time of day it was that the first earthquake occurred; we reminded her that it had been in the early hours of the morning.  She told about her brothers and sisters - she had had eight or nine of them - and how one of them (it sounded as though he'd been one of her favourite brothers) had been killed, along with his daughter, when he ran into a train....                       To be continued....

Buying and Selling

I heard the other day that an old friend of my daughter was not only selling stuff successfully and profitably on Trade Me, but was also the owner of three houses. I know if you get into rental property investment with your eyes wide open and a serious intention of purpose, you’ll do well. It’s overall safer than stocks, definitely more profitable than gambling on the horses, and the occasional awkward tenant apart, it’s usually not too much of a hassle.
We didn’t do very well with it, because we jumped in and bought a house with our eyes mostly shut; saw the problems but ignored them in our enthusiasm to give the thing a go. In the end, while we never had it empty of tenants - which was something of a miracle – we had to replace the roof, redecorate it at least twice, and never managed to deal with some of the problems the previous owner had left us. Things like wonky cupboard doors, and floors that were uneven, and terribly badly put-together shelving and so on. And then the lounge was too small, and ran into the kitchen -–which was also small.
In the end we got rid of it at a loss. Our worst ever investment. We did make some money on another house we bought for rental: my son-in-law who was living there with his daughter was asked one day if he’d be interested in selling it. He was quite happy to move out, and so was my daughter, because there were 40 steps down to the house from the road (!)
We’d bought the place cheaply – probably because of the steps. That’s the way to buy a rental property. Buy something that’s cheap, but is still in good condition. The less you have to spend on it, the better. The person who was interested in buying the property was willing to pay twice what we paid for it! That’s the way to go!
Admittedly the property market was on the move, and we managed for once to catch the wave. As it is at present it might not be so healthy.
Furthermore, the government is thinking seriously about reducing all the perks landlords can get on owning property. Not so good.

Photo courtesy of elisfanclub on Flickr.com

Getting the right list

When I ran the bookshop, one of our biggest difficulties was building up the email newsletter list to a reasonable level, and maintaining it. People were always dropping in, shopping for a while, then getting bored with us and dropping out. Well, at least that’s what you had to assume, as some just stopped responding and vanished. On the other hand we made some good friends amongst these customers, even though we never met most of them.
Because we were a niche market, there was little point in buying a ready-made list of email customers, and in a way, chasing new customers had something of the hunt about it. However, businesses with different markets would no doubt benefit from buying or renting a list, and there are some phenomenally wide-ranging lists around. Martin Worldwide, for instance, possesses a database of over 290 million consumers and 14 million U.S. businesses. That makes our little list at the shop look rather paltry. Still, we made sales through it, and that was the aim!
Martin Worldwide act as a telemarketing lists broker, amongst other things, and offer turnkey marketing solutions. Okay, turnkey marketing isn’t a phrase I’m particularly familiar with, and I had to do a bit of hunting around to find out that it means – I think! – marketing that’s up and running and ready to go for the person wanting the job done. I guess it comes from the idea that you turn the key in your (new) home and voila! everything is ready waiting for you.

Fellows and Sellers

I went to the formal introduction of the Otago University’s three new ‘Fellows’ the other evening after work. It was held in the Hocken Library foyer, and the nibbles were very good.
We were invited because one of the Fellows is an old friend of mine – and my wife works with his wife. The three Fellows are the Burns Fellow, the Mozart Fellow and the Frances Hodgkins Fellow. My friend is the Mozart Fellow, which means he gets a year’s time associated with the University in which he can be relieved of working to deadlines, finding new work, creating music he may not want to create and so forth. He can spend the year thinking about what he’d like to do, compositions that don’t require to be for something.
Anyway, while we were there we met another old acquaintance, also a musician, who, during the course of our conversation mentioned that his twenty-something son sells on Trade Me, full-time, and ‘is rather tight-lipped about how much he makes.’ The indication was that the son was doing very well, selling imported CDs. I’d like to know who he is, so I could check him out, but it’s not easy to find who people are on Trade Me, since we all go under usernames.
I’ve been selling secondhand books on Trade Me for the last five or six months, as I’ve probably mentioned before. I’ve done reasonably well, but would hardly call it making any sort of living. It’s a hobby at this point. To sell on Trade Me you need to focus on some part of the market where you can buy small so you can sell big. Plainly imported CDs are one area, and in the book on successful selling on Trade Me the author talks about a young man who set out to become a millionaire on Trade Me, in spite of lacking any start-up assistance from Work and Income. He sells a lot of hand-held technology and the like. He has become a millionaire, and he basically imports at a fraction of the cost and sells at prices below the usual NZ retail. Obviously, if I was to take up Trade Me as a job, as some people have done, I’d need to get into a market rather more ‘with it’ than secondhand books. Which would mean throwing aside all I know of books, and starting afresh. Guess it’s never too late to learn…but!

Me and Trade Me

My wife and I went to Christchurch on Friday, partly to give her a bit of a holiday away from the house (even though she’s been on holiday for three weeks, we’d had to stay at home because I’m working evenings at present); partly to see my daughter and her partner, and her toddler, who’s just begun to walk; and, as an added inventive, partly to dip in and out of various secondhand bookshops and op shops and such on the way to find some books to sell on Trade Me.
We didn’t come back exactly loaded up with books, but there are certainly enough there to keep me going for a few weeks. And it’ll give me a chance to list some new stock as opposed to the items I’ve listed several times before.
Trade Me is surely one of NZ’s phenomena. What other institution in the country (apart from the government, perhaps) can you mention in conversation and everyone else will have had some experience of it? If they haven’t bought on Trade Me themselves, they’ll know someone who has – and they ‘got this great bargain’ – and the details will come pouring out.
My daughter regularly sells on Trade Me and is quite canny with it. She doesn’t appear to be a businesswoman, but when it comes to that sort of business, she’s very shrewd. And within the wider family I think everyone has bought something – everyone! That’s quite extraordinary, when you think about it.
This isn’t an advertisement for Trade Me – or for my involvement on it – as some of these posts quite unabashedly are. But if you’re interested in checking out what I’m selling, just click here!