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Are your property emotions being managed by others?
As many of you know, Blue Wealth turned 10 in January. It’s been a decade filled with growth, challenge, learning, laughter and tears. I’ve loved it and continue to enjoy driving the business for the benefit of all stakeholders – clients, referral partners, developers and staff.
So, what’s changed over the last 10 years? I could be here all day talking about that topic. Lots has changed in politics, sport, technology, economics, society and so on. Everyone knows what a vegan is now, Social Media is massive and we’ve had six Prime Ministerial terms. That will likely become seven next.
For the sake of this article I want to concentrate on property news. All the way back in the good old days of 2009, Australians invested in property and as a general rule forgot about it. Left it in the background and let it do its job over the years. Investors rarely got emotional about it. Most of that was due to the fact that property isn’t valued regularly, and the market was perceived to be relatively stable. Being Aussies, we generally just cruised along and let things unfold. Generations of Aussies built their wealth that way.
So why have people’s perception of their investment property changed over the past decade? The answer is simple. Smart phones. If you have a smart phone and have your notifications on, as many of us do, your belief systems and emotions are being managed by someone else almost hourly.
Ten years ago, if you wanted to know what was happening you had to go searching for it. Now we don’t have to go looking for it. It finds us! Every day we get numerous notifications about a whole range of topics. Of course, one of those topics is property. It’s a topic Aussies love hearing about. I get at least three articles a day sent to me about the market being up or the market being down or where I should invest or where I should avoid. They typically come in as notifications from ‘news’ sources. I don’t want to turn off the notifications because I quite like being notified about the latest sport and general news.
Surely getting notified is a good thing? Surely, it’s good for me to be informed about where the market is at. My answer to that is a resounding NO! Why? Because emotions are an enormous part of the investment journey. Reading conflicting, opinion-based articles (or just the headlines) every day send our emotions into a random spasm. In the absolute majority of cases, the articles lack substance, aren’t based on reliable data and are written by someone who doesn’t own a property and has very little experience in the industry.
I’d like to draw on an example of just how emotionally driven our property headlines have become. Over the last 10 years, our media’s reporting has become rife with click bait that is designed to our trigger emotions. As we all know, the notion of fear sells the most papers and is often a go to for media outlets. A simple google search of “property market” brings up over 1.6 million results. The last 12 months alone has delivered the following property headlines:
The key to these headlines is the emotive language used to manipulate your notion of fear. Descriptive wording such as “Crash”, “Scared” and “Debt Bomb” are used to draw your attention and manipulate you into reading articles. The substance of which is often based on skewed and overstated data.
So, what’s the answer? The simplest one is to turn off your notifications and take control of what you read when you’re ready to read it. I’ve turned off most notifications. Social media notifications are the worst of all distractions. Between Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, WhatsApp, texts and email there’s no chance of staying present. My advice is to turn off ALL notifications and work backwards from there. Turn one or two back on each week and find the right balance. For me, being aware of having my emotions managed by notifications has helped me become much more resilient. I’m much better now at completely shutting out the noise these headlines create.
Property is the same animal it was 10 years ago. The best approach is to invest and focus on the long term. The less you read the better. When you need to know, call us and we’ll bring you up to speed. Read our weekly blog article, that will give you all you need. We all deserve the peace of being in control of our own emotions and maintaining a smooth path to creating wealth through property.