I just closed rental deal number five. For those of you keeping score, that means I've turned five rental sides and a sale in 10 months, not bad since I've been writing nearly half time.

But it also means I have no renters to play with right now. My one active rental client is in L.A. for the Oscars, and the market moves so quickly here it's not even worth searching till she gets back. I'm working on two sales deals and I stoke those fires lovingly, but it's not the same as the slam-bang excitement of trying to see 10 properties in a day.  more...

So it's time to make New Year's resolutions again. Gosh, after 2005 (when my New Year's resolution was "Get married and start a new career") and 2006 (when my New Year's resolution was "Stay married and don't starve to death") it seems tough to go back to the old standby of "Lose 10 pounds and go to the dentist twice."  more...

"Santa baby, I want a yacht and that's really not/a lot ... "

OK, seriously, Santa, I don't need a yacht but I really do need a spam filter. I have three personal e-mails, two Web site e-mails, and my work e-mail, and they're awfully clogged by the royal family of Nigeria trying to get me do a bank transfer.

Also, I appreciate the e-mails saying, "Hey, it's Haylie," but I don't know anyone named Haylie, and the hour a day I spend fending her off tires me out.  more...

So this mortgage guy has been trying to meet me for months.

I am generally suspicious of mortgage people: In my own experience as a buyer, they've been horrible. When I bought my first apartment, a little co-op for $65,000 (oh, those were the days!) I thought my mortgage broker was OK, but now I wonder if that's just because I didn't know any better.  more...

I just got a $6,000 commission -- for a rental.

Wait, it gets better: I found her on the Internet.

She posted on some message boards I frequent, explaining that she was relocating, wanted to know about neighborhoods, and was looking for "an awesome broker." That alone differentiated her from the mainstream of Internet chat that I usually read -- most posters want advice about how to kill their brokers, or how to stiff their brokers, not information on how to actually hook up with one.  more...

So does no one ever simply concede a point?

I have a rental client coming into town tomorrow. (Actually, by the time this goes up on the Web and you read this, I'll be showing her properties.) She's a relo from the Midwest, referred to me by her husband's business partner and his wife, whom I just placed. She knows, let's see, no one in New York.

So I feel like she's a pretty captive client, but I still have to find her the world's greatest apartment or she won't stay captured. And we're in a little bit of a lull right now, it being December.  more...

OK, if someone has a system for keeping track of all the little loose receipts, please tell me.

Since I'm not in the suburbs, I don't drive clients around (there was the time I drove my married friends to house-hunt in Brooklyn, but lost some of my cool points by asking the husband to parallel park for me). I do, however, ferry clients around by taxi, which generates receipts smaller than post-its. I'm good, I stick the little bits in my wallet, and then four taxis later pull out a five and find that the ground is covered in white confetti.  more...

There is so much work -- two actual clients! One woman I met on some real estate Internet boards is coming to Manhattan this weekend, and I've been spending hours looking for the right high-end rental for her and her family. It's so hard because I have less experience with rental units, and so I'm not as confident about what they will look like, and there are a lot of "hijacked" listings, so half the time I see a posting for $17,000 I have to do a ton of detective work to find the real thing for $14,000.

And then there's the sale: the Big Sale.  more...

Since I just sold a unit in an apartment building, my next project was clear: drop 200 pieces of direct mail on that building, celebrating my greatness. I am the slowest person in the world with direct mail, since I believe everything has to be just so, and since I don't have the graphic abilities to do a really slick piece I settled on a heart-to-heart letter, which meant I made a little package with each one and hand-addressed them.  more...

I am not generally an extreme sports person: my idea of great surfing is hanging ten with the remote control. But when hubby and I went on our honeymoon, we went to Peru to see friends, and once we were down there, well, we had to spend five days in the Amazon. Since then I've been an armchair adventurer, so I definitely clicked with the idea of a new business book, "Your Career is an Extreme Sport: Focus. Drive.  more...

DONE!

The first listing that I took waaaay back in the spring just closed today, and I got a check for $6,000 and everything.

This must be the fun part.

It doesn't normally take six months to sell something here; in fact, we had our meeting of the minds much earlier. The problem was that the intended purchaser was a grad student without terribly high assets. Mom and dad, instead of making a gift of the down payment to their academically minded son, wanted to be co-buyers.  more...