Main Street Canmore :: Track Set :: Ready to Ski

This weekend promises an exciting weekend in Canmore with the town hosting the Alberta World Cup.  You can expect to see all the top cross-country ski racers in the World competing at this event as they fine tune their skills and fitness levels for the upcoming Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver.

There are some great activities for spectators and local ski enthusiasts alike this weekend too.  The festivities start this afternoon with amateur ski races down main street Canmore (see pictures).  For a list of all the activities visit the Alberta World Cup Website here

Come on by the RE/MAX Office this weekend, we’ll have a table set up outside with Cowbells that you can take for free to help make some noise and cheer on our Canadian Olympic Athletes.

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Canmore Nordic Centre :: Taken using Autostitch

This month’s iphone application that highly recommend is called Autostitch.  Now we all know that the camera in the iphone isn’t the greatest in the Smartphone World but if, like me, you are a Realtor in a Resort town with incredible views, this is a fantastic tool to have in your arsenal of applications.

In Canmore when people buy real estate they are buying the view.  Period.  The house or condo could be 5000 square feet with all the latest and greatest design features but if there are no views potential Buyer’s are just not as interested.  On the same token, being a Resort town we have a high percentage of Buyer’s from out of town who look at properties over the internet and then call us if they would like more information sent to them.  This is where I have found Autostitch to be a real winner.

autostitch for iphone.

Autostitch is a photography tool that allows you to take a sequence of shots with your iphone camera in a way you would typically take individual photographs with a regular point and shoot and piece them together for the panoramic view.  Once you have taken the images with your iphone you can open Autostitch and it will ‘Stitch’ the photographs together to form a seamless panoramic view.  I have used this application numerous times now to take panoramic shots from the back decks of homes my clients are interested in so that they can get a better picture of the complete view rather than from 1 photograph on the mls system.  I’ve also used the application to take shots of properties on the inside to give a better perspective of the open Main floor plan.  So far Autostitch has been very reliable, it’s easy to use and when I downloaded it was a free application.  Another wonderful free application helping me provide yet another service to my clients that my competition is missing out on.

Have any experience with this application or any others that you use regularly that you can share – let me know in the comments.

1999: Year of the Rabbit

My son turned 10 today.

I’m still trying to come to terms with that statement.  My son turned 10 today.  MY son turned 10 today.  I think it’s the first time I’ve really thought ‘geez, where did the time go?’

I remember my 10th birthday, my Dad sat me on his lap, we were sitting on the couch in the living room, next to the bay window that looked out over the park, and he looked at me awestruck and just said ‘Double Digits, I can’t believe you’ve reached Double Digits already’.

Today, I finally know how he felt all those years ago.  I know, because I’ve had so many of my friends that have older children tell me, that most if not all parents go through this body numbing experience when their oldest child reaches their 10th birthday.  In my opinion it’s the first time you stop long enough in your parenting career to reflect on a decade ‘with child’ while realizing that in only a meager 8 more years your Child could be out of the house.  I’m also believe this is when parenting really begins, changing diapers is easy pickings compared to the next few years of adolescent puberty and all the turmoil that can bring with it.

Anyway, I thought I’d reflect on what I was doing in 1999 and take a look at some history from 1999 to see what really happened in the year he was born.

My son wasn’t the only ‘first’ in my life in 1999.  I bought my first house and moved in, I bought my first computer, I signed up for the internet for the first time, I was given a promotion to my first Restaurant Manager’s position, I bought my first road bike, I sold my first mountain bike on the internet and I watched an athlete I admire win his first of seven Tour de France titles.  Here’s what else happened in the Year of the Rabbit / Hare:

1999 – A year in History:

• Named the ‘International Year of Older Persons’ by the United Nations

Lance Armstrong 1999 Tour de France

Spongebob Squarepants

• The Euro was formed

• Hugo Chavez became the President of Venezuela

• The Mandalay Bay Hotel opens in Las Vegas

• Nunavut becomes Canada’s third territory

• Spoungebob Square pants makes his debut on Nikleodeon

• Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace is released in Theatre’s

• Kosovo Wars

• Napster debuts

• George W. Bush announces he will seek the Republican Party nomination for President of the United States

• Apple release their Power Macintosh G4

• World population reaches 6 Billion

• The ExxonMobil Corporation merger is completed, forming the largest company in the world

• Lance Armstrong won the first of seven Tour de France titles

• Canmore hosted the 2nd of three straight mountain bike world cup races at the Canmore Nordic Centre

• And last but not least, let’s not forget the fiasco that was Y2K

So what were you doing in 1999 while watching VHS tapes on your rear projection T.V. and dancing to Ricky Martin’s ‘Livin’ La Vida Loca’? Let me know, I’d love to hear about it.

Two weeks ago I received a call from Dr. Buchko’s assistant asking if I could make it for surgery on December 2nd instead of my scheduled appointment on January 22nd 2010.

The View near the top of the Seven Summits

About 18 months ago I was on a Mountain Bike road trip with a good friend of mine when I crashed on the first day of the trip.  I fractured a couple of ribs and hurt my left shoulder.  The road trip was planned to be a week-long bike fest and I wasn’t going to be the one that made us turn around and go home, so I rode the next few days (painfully) on some epic trails throughout Southern B.C., including the IMBA designated Seven Summits trail in Rossland. On the first day of the trip we decided to stay in Invermere and ride the trails in town and just down the road in Fairmont.  It was in Fairmont where my front tire rolled off the rim as I was descending in to what I like to call “a compression bomb-hole” and the force of my speed / weight / momentum shot me in to the side of the bomb-hole breaking my body in a couple of places.

After my ribs healed I noticed that the pain in my shoulder would wake me up a couple of times a night, and after a couple of months I thought it might be time to have a professional take a look.  18 months of Physio, Chiropractic adjustments, MRI’s, X-rays, doctors and surgeon’s appointments and we figured out that the injury to my shoulder was a little more serious than a sprain or strain, hence the call two weeks ago.

I jumped at the chance to go in for surgery earlier than scheduled as it would hopefully relate to an earlier recovery allowing me to jump back on the Mountain Bike as soon as Spring hits.  Last Wednesday I entered the Banff Mineral Springs Hospital for the Surgery.  At 12 noon they froze my shoulder and arm and wheeled me into the operating room about an hour later at 1:10pm.  As I was awake I thought it only right that I be allowed to watch the surgery on the screen, which the Surgeon was more than happy to accommodate.  Feeling nothing except the vibrations of the ‘cartlidge and bone trimmer’ and the tugging and pulling of the Surgeon on my shoulder as he corkscrewed the camera and tools into the joint I was completely taken aback with watching what looked like an underwater documentary on the screen.  With cartlidge flapping like sea anemones and the shoulder bones looking a little like coral reef, the trimmer and Surgeon made short work of clipping and shaving the joint down and vacuuming out the excess waste.  Incredible to watch.

Throughout my stay in the hospital from “check-in to check-out” the nurses, doctors, surgeons and physio’s were extremely professional, caring, approachable and friendly.  I cannot speak highly enough of their care for me and the other people on the same ward I was on, they were always looking out for you and making sure you were comfortable and managing the pain effectively.

I’ve been on the couch for the last week, reading, surfing the net, writing blog posts and taking naps as I recover from the surgery.  The shoulder already feels better than it did before the surgery – although I have a long way to go before I get the full mobility back – I have now stopped taking the Tylenol 3’s as the sharp pain is now no more than a constant ache.

This is my shout-out to the Banff Mineral Springs Hospital and all the staff, nurses, doctors and surgeons that manage and run the hospital.  Thank-you for your dedication to our health care system you are a credit to your profession and should be extremely proud of the services you provide.

Tim Horton's Finder

If you value coffee as much as I do then this month’s iPhone application recommendation is for you.  Over the past two months I’ve recommended applications that can help your productivity and I believe this month is no different.

The Tim Horton’s app (Horton Finder) is free at the iTunes App store.  This App is magical! It finds the closest Tim Hortons to your current location, using the geo-location feature on the phone and gives you directions! You can also check on the balance of your Timmy Card.

A great application for the winter time to find your next caffeine fix, also a great application for Realtor’s in the City if you need to find a Tim Horton’s to meet clients at to sign documents.

All I need to find now is this exact same application for Starbucks!  For more of my monthly iPhone applications click here

Click here to go to the evernote website

MONTHLY iPHONE APPLICATION

I was introduced to Evernote about 3 months by a client who was using it daily.  He raved about how easy it was to use and how useful it had become in his everyday life and he thought it could be really useful in the day-to-day World of my job as a Realtor.  I signed up for a free evernote account while I was still talking to him and now consider it an essential application both on my phone and on my laptop.

Evernote allows you to take text notes, voice notes and camera snapshots right on your phone.  I find I use it almost daily now, for such tasks as taking typed notes of property features at a listing appointment,  I also take snapshots of the property and file it in evernote so when I go back to the office to complete the CMA I can put a package together from all the notes and pictures in evernote and send it to the Seller.  I take notes at seminars and networking lunches and I am constantly taking voice notes when I’m driving so I can keep track of people I need to call or tasks I still need to complete in the day.  The desktop / laptop version of the software is just as easy to use as the iphone application and syncs seamlessly with the iphone application.  On the desktop version you can also take isight notes to keep on track.  You can title all notes and tag all notes so it’s easy to keep track of them and call them back up when needed. Do you have any information to share about evernote, let me  know in the comments below.

I thought I’d start a new section to my blog this month, my monthly iphone application recommendation for Realtors.

In Canmore real estate the iphone apps and technology in general have been slow to catch on with many of the old guard Canmore real estate agents.  Most see it as a fad or a gadget that will bring little to no value to their business or they just don’t want to learn this new technology, I’m afraid to say it but these realtors will fall behind in their business practises at an alarming rate as we move forward and younger Realtors that are tech savvy move into our business.  This monthly post is to help those realtors that are looking to catch on and stay up to date with technology and smart phone applications by recommending applications that are easy to use and that I find add value to my job on a daily basis.  My goal is to help others understand and learn these incredible applications.

I’ve used several different iphone apps over the past year to 18 months I’ve owned an iphone and this post, and one a month from this point forward will highlight the ones I have found most useful.

The first one I wanted to talk about was Convertbot.  Convertbot is a must have application (Best iPhone apps 0.99 cents in the app store) that quickly and easily converts, area, currency, volume, angles, speed, power and host of other measurements quickly and efficiently with the minimal of button pressing.  This has been an incredibly handy application for my Canmore real estate business, most notably when it comes time to convert square footage to square metres.  In Canmore we use two mls listing services, the first is www.realtor.ca and the second is our proprietory listing service called Interface.  Interface allows us to input our measurements by feet and square feet whereas realtor.ca requires us to input our measurements by metres and square metres.  This handy little application will translate those measurements at the touch of a button, saving valuable time when entering listings in to the database.

This nifty little application also enables you to instantly answer conversion questions when your Buyer clients are in a house and wanting to know how many square feet a particular room is when looking a the square metres on the mls sheet.  I’ve also used it to convert U.S. Dollars and English Pounds to Canadian Dollars so clients are aware of exactly how much a property will cost them.

Stay tuned for my recommendation next month and please feel free to leave your comments | opinions at the bottom of the page.

Thanks

Crossbow Point

The Canmore Real Estate sales stats are in for the month of September and show that we continued our journey to a more balanced market. In total we sold 39 properties in town for the month of September, one property less than we sold in August.   In September of 2008 there were only 17 sales of property in Canmore, when we compare year to date figures for 2009 over 2008 our current sales up to the end of September are 227 properties sold, compared to 204 properties in 2008.

Canmore real estate sales prices in September continued to stay flat when comparing the square foot price with the past 5 months of the year.  September’s square foot price for sold property came in at $373 a square foot and the average selling price for property was $615,000.

Canmore real estate fell in to the following categories for the month:

210 Benchlands Terrace

12 Apartments

2 Fourplexes

3 half Duplexes

1 Lot

1 Manufactured Home

1 Mobile Home

12 Single Family Homes

7 Townhomes

Activity remained high on properties all the way through the month of September and we currently have 15 properties that are conditionally sold in Canmore.  Canmore real estate for October continues to be strong with activity and calls for showings, time will tell this month if the activity stays strong for the whole month as the snow starts to fly and families gather together for Thanksgiving.

For more information on the Canmore Real Estate market or if you have any real estate questions that relate to Canmore please contact me.  You can e-mail me at soldbyrichard@gmail.com, call me at 1.403.688.7629 or follow my Canmore Lifestyle tweets on Twitter at @soldbyrichard.

Follow Me

I get this question a lot, daily in fact, or some other question asking the same of me – why do you waste your time on twitter?, why do you tweet?, what are you hoping to achieve on twitter?, how is twitter going to help your business?

All of these questions, and more, come from colleagues in the office that are getting sick of hearing the chirp of my tweetdeck every 10 seconds – and don’t understand what Twitter means to me.  On a larger scale they don’t get why I spend my time on twitter or social media sites in general and cannot fathom how it could help grow my business.  I tell them I don’t ‘tweet’ for business, I don’t ‘facebook’ someone for business, I tweet and facebook people I have, or want a connection to socially or with people I share a similar lifestyle interests with.

Over the past several months on Twitter I’ve had the priviledge of meeting some incredible people and join in some amazing conversations with people I would never have had the opportunity to meet and interact with.  I’ve learn’t more about technology, the internet, politics, sports, social media, search engines, social interaction, real estate, business, finance, World views, different Cultures – the list is endless, and I’ve made some great friendships.

As most of you know, I live in Canmore, Alberta, Canada – a town of about 10,000 year round residents located in the Canadian Rocky Mountains just East of Banff.  In the past week and a half I’ve sat down and had coffee or breakfast with 5 local residents I met on twitter and been on bike rides with 2 more local’s I met on twitter.  I’ve been invited to go on a winter camping trip with my family to the Elizabeth Parker Hut in December with 5 or 6 other families from one of these coffee discussions and been introduced to friends of friends of people on Twitter that share the same interests.  I’ve been given advice about which camera I should buy to take photo’s of listings, marketing advice on how to further expand my reach on the internet, received referrals from new home builders who had nothing available in a particular price range for someone they were talking to and learnt about some of the different Countries of Origin that people who live in Canmore originally hailed from.  I’m from the U.K. originally, I met fellow Canmorites this week from Brazil and Turkey and learnt lots about both of these Countries while having coffee.

I have become great friends with a Long Haul Truck Driver who takes great pride in his job, the pictures he posts of Western Canada and the people who follow him.  He pulled into Canmore a few weeks back with his 53 foot trailer to stop and say hi to me and meet face to face.  I had breakfast this morning with a 61 year lady from Ontario who I connected with on Twitter, she loves the mountains and wants to move here someday, but is over the moon that she is able to vacation out in the Mountains for 3 weeks in September every year and go hiking.

Will any of these friendships I’ve made on twitter over the past several months result in business?….maybe, some already have, but the friendships I’ve made, the lessons I’ve learnt and the sheer passion for the Mountains I’ve experienced through all these people far outweigh any reason for tweeting for business.

Twitter for me is truly social, it’s about the wonderful people I meet, interact with, talk to, meet in person and build friendships with.  It’s not about generating business and promoting myself as a Realtor – I couldn’t care less, promoting myself as a person,living the lifestyle my family and I have chosen and spending time with my family and like-minded individual’s is far more important to me.

Canadian Housing Markets Buck Recession and Trend Upwards, says RE/MAX

Click the above link for the report from RE/MAX