Comments on: What if a great idea knocked on your door?

By: Hawk

Hawk — Fri, 05 May 2006 17:30:18 +0000

I’m not sure I’d expect a call back from an apartment. If I didn’t get a warm body, I’d call again until I did.

I’m not sure why… I assume it’s probably because a *lot* of people probably contact them, but very few are more than just casual people looking for more information or doing long-term planning.

It might be a last-mile failure, but it’s not *my* last mile failure.

The way I look at apartments, I will decide on an apartment and then try to find out if they have one available. If they do, then I try to lease it.

I won’t cast out a wide net and evaluate only the ones that call me back. I didn’t have this problem with my current apartment because they were available during the day every time I called.

By: Allen

Allen — Fri, 05 May 2006 17:03:20 +0000

Here’s another scenario. You go to an apartment complex and the salesperson takes you on a tour of the apartments. You fill out your contact information and tell them you will be moving in 2 months. Do they call back? Ever? Not in my experience. We must have looked at 8-10 apartments and only one called us back. They were in a remote area so I suppose they were more hungry.

By: Maureen

Maureen — Fri, 05 May 2006 15:08:12 +0000

I agree with Chris Sivori that paying a commission would motivate the employees to do their jobs more efficiently however, a lot of companies are just plain cheap and the minute they offer a commission, they reduce the hourly rate/ salaries and at the end of the day it’s a catch 22.

By: maulleigh

maulleigh — Fri, 05 May 2006 04:10:44 +0000

You’re forgetting something really important: you’re not the only person who has that kind of money. Have you ever posted an ad on craigslist and had hundreds of answers? I’ll bet there are plenty of wealthy young men in the Bay Area who are looking for housing. There might have been 30 or 40 people on that answering machine. After cherry picking a couple answers, they probably went from there. To call back all those people would be a waste of time once they got the winner: and s/he was probably the early worm. Although, now that I re-read it, I see that there are probably other factors involved. One, they could have someone’s brother in charge: the brother who doesn’t give a damn. I have a very bureaucratic job where I get paid the same amount whether or no I do work. I’ll bet there’s a little communism somewhere going on.

By: Tech

Tech — Thu, 04 May 2006 22:18:24 +0000

Thanks for prompt answer! I really appreciate that! You really did not fail on the last mile

By: Ramit Sethi

Ramit Sethi — Thu, 04 May 2006 22:15:06 +0000

Tech, thanks. You should subscribe to my Atom feed, which is full-text so you won't have to click anywhere: http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/atom.xml

By: Tech

Tech — Thu, 04 May 2006 22:11:54 +0000

Hi Ramit

Well, maybe I am not thousands dollars worth visitor of this site but when you talk about last mile there is one thing I would like to complain about your site. Maybe it is only me but you judge it. I will speak for myself.

I have made subscription to your RSS feed. I like your articles. The only thing I do not like is that you put content of your message in an iframe. That loads html from your site. Well I like your site but I do not like html messages in my Thunderbird. Almost every subscription is plain text. I can search archives, index it and more. Also I do not like “freezing my brain” for 5 seconds while I click on message till html from your site loads. It should be instantaneously in my RSS aggregator and displayed.

Because of that I almost delete subscription to your RSS feed. There is something worth reading that prevents me from doing that. Well, as I said it is maybe just I. You judge or offer 2 subscriptions HTML/Plain text

By: chris sivori

chris sivori — Thu, 04 May 2006 20:13:00 +0000

This is why property management companies need to pay a commission. A lot do. Any time sales are involved, it helps to incentivize unsupervised employees.

By: Alex Ravenel

Alex Ravenel — Thu, 04 May 2006 20:11:27 +0000

I was recently looking for an apartment and the same thing happened to me at multiple places. I really didn’t understand it–I was potentially going to give the owner thousands of dollars over the next few months, but a simple return phone call was too much effort. Too bad, they lost my business, and I found a better place anyways. And the “For Rent”/”Available Now” signs are still out front. Guess they didn’t want to rent them too bad…

By: hopster

hopster — Thu, 04 May 2006 18:39:19 +0000

I’ve been waiting for a Roth IRA article for a while, great to hear that it’s coming! I opened my Roth IRA just before the 2005 cut-off and it feels great to have finally pulled the trigger. I wish I would have done it sooner.

I went through Vanguard and am polishing up an article on how Vanguard IRAs work. It will be posted soon on my blog for all to check out.

http://peermentornetwork.blogspot.com/