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Bouncing Forward

esilience is the theme of 2020,” I offered in my forthcoming introduction to the Homes & Estates/Wall Street Journal supplement, due out in just a few weeks. Even with the doom and gloom of the recent news, I still believe this is the right message. We have every reason to hope that we will push through fear and uncertainty to come out on the other side, stronger and better than ever before.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof recently offered up an optimistic message in an article called, “We Interrupt This Gloom to Offer…Hope.” He wrote about finding a sense of possibility and opportunity in the future. “Maybe national anguish can again be the midwife of progress,” he wrote. Change is often driven by traumas. I look at the change already happening in real estate, and I am reassured by what I see. This is our chance to reset — whether it’s the way we run our businesses or the way we connect with each other. How can we do our jobs better and serve our clients better? We’ve already proven that we can do a lot of our work virtually. While nothing can replace face-to-face interactions, we don’t have to physically be in an office to close a deal. Properties are still selling; they’re just selling differently.

Some of our Coldwell Banker Global Luxury® Property Specialists have already beaten their year-to-date sales records — that’s saying something in this climate! The Coldwell Banker® brand has never given up on our promise to support our agents’ marketing efforts, in good times and in bad. There was a time when we weren’t sure we were going to publish the last Wall Street Journal supplement of this year, but we found a way to make it happen. We even found a way to strengthen the program by expanding our reach to 201 of the most exclusive ZIP codes in the country and including distribution to 100 clients of the Global Luxury Property Specialists who are featured in the magazine. That means advertisers are putting their listings in front of the clients of our very top agents, like Jade Mills and The Jills-Zeder Group. Now that is opportunity!

I’m not saying we don’t still face enormous difficulties in 2020; surely we do. But there is opportunity to be found in the challenges — to persevere despite being a little bruised and battered. We’ve lost our innocence but not our drive. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey calls it “calloused hope,” and that kind of hope is often the most successful. Resilience is often thought of in terms of “bouncing back,” but we are bouncing forward.

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