The housing market appears to be picking up. The National Association of Realtors says existing home sales surprised everyone with a 9.5% gain in February, the biggest in a year, following a healthy January increase. Inventories are up more than 10% the past year.

Plus, more new homes are on the way, as housing starts went up more than 10% in February, with much needed single-family starts now up more than 35% from a year ago. Home completions are almost 20% up for the month.

Finally, more sellers are putting their homes on the market. In the week ending March 16, a whopping 17.8% more resale listings hit the market compared to last year, the highest year-over-year growth rate in nearly three years.

The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.” ~ Mark Twain

Some historians speculate that April Fools’ Day dates back to 1582, when France switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian Calendar, as called for by the Council of Trent in 1563. In the Julian Calendar, as in the Hindu calendar, the new year began with the Spring equinox around April 1.

People who were slow to get the news or failed to recognize that the start of the new year had moved to January 1 and continued to celebrate it during the last week of March through April 1 became the butt of jokes and hoaxes and were called “April fools.”

These pranks included having paper fish placed on their backs and being referred to as “poisson d’avril” (April fish), said to symbolize a young, easily caug ht fish and a gullible person.

April Fools’ Day spread throughout Britain during the 18th century. In Scotland, the tradition became a two-day event, starting with “hunting the gowk,” in which people were sent on phony errands (gowk is a word for cuckoo bird, a symbol for fool) and followed by Tailie Day, which involved pranks played on people’s derrieres, such as pinning fake tails or “kick me” signs on them.

In modern times, people have gone to great lengths to create elaborate April Fool Day Hoaxes. Newspapers, radio and TV stations and websites have participated in the April 1 tradition of reporting outrageous fictional claims that have fooled their audiences.

In 1957, the BBC reported that Swiss farmers were experiencing a record spaghetti crop and showed footage of people harvesting noodles from trees.

In 1985, Sports Illustrat ed writer George Plimpton tricked many readers when he ran a made-up article about a rookie pitcher named Sidd Finch who could throw a fastball over 168 miles per hour.

In 1992, National Public Radio ran a spot with former President Richard Nixon saying he was running for president again… only it was an actor, not Nixon, and the segment was all an April Fools’ Day prank that caught the country by surprise.

In 1996, Taco Bell, the fast-food restaurant chain, duped people when it announced it had agreed to purchase Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell and intended to rename it the Taco Liberty Bell.

In 1998, after Burger King advertised a “Left-Handed Whopper,” scores of clueless customers requested the fake sandwich.

Google notoriously hosts an annual April Fools’ Day prank that has included e verything from “telepathic search” to the ability to play Pac Man on Google Maps.

For the average trickster, there is always the classic April Fools’ Day prank of swapping the contents of sugar and salt containers. ~ History.com

Cindy Glynn
Coldwell Banker American Home
479-586-6262
agentcindyg@gmail.com

Buyers are back. The Mortgage Bankers Association reports applications for purchase mortgages, down for more than a month, jumped 11% over the prior week. Even refinance applications were up 8% for the same period.

Sellers are back too. Realtor.com says “The first couple of months of 2024 have proven to be positive for inventory levels, as the number of homes actively For Sale was at its highest level since 2020.”

And sellers have plenty of equity to work with. Analytics firm CoreLogic reports that the average homeowner with a mortgage ended the year with $298,000 in equity, gaining more than $24,000 in Q4 alone.

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. ~ Thomas A. Edison

Sir James Dyson, British inventor and founder of the Dyson Company, is a firm believer in failure. In fact, he sees it as an essential part of his success — a step toward a truly Innovative solution.

When Dyson invented his first Dual Cyclone vacuum cleaner, which hit stores in 1993, he spent 15 years creating 5,126 versions that failed before he made one that worked. The payoff was a multi-billion dollar company known for its creativity and forward-thinking designs.

Here is a short interview with Dyson by “Entrepreneur Magazine”:

Entrepreneur: You often talk about the value of failure. How has it helped you?

Dyson: Failure is interesting — it’s part of making progress.
You never learn from success, but you do learn from failure.

When I created the Dual Cyclone vacuum, I started out with a simple idea, and by the end, it got more audacious and interesting. I got to a place I never could have imagined because I learned what worked and didn’t work.

Entrepreneur: How do you embrace a long series of failures without letting frustration overwhelm you?

Dyson: We have to embrace failure and almost get a kick out of it. Not in a perverse way, but in a problem-solving way. Life is a mountain of solvable problems and I enjoy that.

Entrepreneur: Your cyclon e technology is often held up as a model of creative problem solving. Does failure help spur your creativity?

Dyson: It absolutely does. You don’t have to bother to be creative if the first time you do something, it works.

Creativity is creating something that no one could have devised; something that hasn’t existed before and solves problems that haven’t been solved before. Making something work is a very creative thing to do.

Entrepreneur: When you fail, how do you approach the next iteration?

Dyson: What I often do is just think of a completely obtuse thing to do, almost the wrong thing to do. That often works because you start a different approach, something no one has tried. You get a different perspective and view of (the problem).

Entrepreneur: What do you do to encourage taking risks among your employees?

Dyson: You must remove any sort of criticism. A revolutionary suggestion often sounds stupid and you don’t want people who make cynical remarks.

It’s a matter of having the right attitude — humble, curious, determined, willing to fail and try. (I hire people who) embrace the fact that failure is interesting.

Entrepreneur: What would you say to entrepreneurs or inventors who feel afraid to fail or worried that they’ll be judged?

Dyson: That’s a sort of lesson in life, isn’t it? You mustn’t be worried about what people will say about you. If you want to do something different, you’re going to come up against a lot of naysayers.

Big companies tend not to take risks, so there’s a big opportunity for entrepreneurs to take them and march on competitors. Business is constantly changing, constantly evolving. You’ve got to try things out.

That kind of advice may be lip service for a lot of people, but coming from the likes of a billionaire who got there because of 5,126 failed prototypes, it has a pretty big impact! ~ Nadia Goodman

Cindy Glynn
Coldwell Banker American Home
479-586-6262
agentcindyg@gmail.com