June 21, 2006
It was a great joy to sleep in today, although after riding for 6 straight days and then having a whirlwind day yesterday, I still feel like I could sleep for hours. I spent a quick hour working in the motel lobby on my presentation, and then we took off for Mobile Alabama, where I spoke for an hour to the Mobile RIG. What a great treat it was! It was a small group, but a great location and a nice room. The investors appeared to be pretty sophisticated, with some very experienced folks in the group. I very much enjoyed the opportunity to talk, and only wished I could have had more time to talk informally with them. It was an hour lunch, and most of them had to leave immediately after I spoke.
Steve Brown is the one who runs this group, and you’ll hear more about him. I think he will make the “interesting possibilities” list we are creating. Houses are still very available in the $50-100K range; with $180K being in the expensive range, and the market is still good. It doesn’t appear to have hit the doldrums like many other areas. I was very impressed with Steve and will keep you posted on more.
We had a chance to quickly see downtown Mobile, and really enjoyed it. We did the same thing of logging on to Verizon to find an Office Depot in Mobile, and check emails and print whatever we needed. We got water, a new 2006 road atlas, and stocked up on printer cartridges for our Canon IP90 (our last one died just as we got to the REIA meeting).
We headed back past Bayou La Batre on to Biloxi MS where I was to appear and introduce ourselves again at a REIA evening meeting. We stayed on Verizon Wireless, as I had a great chance while not on roaming to check emails and send emails quickly. We also found another Verizon store in Biloxi.
The Verizon store was past Biloxi, and we had extraordinary luck. Chelsea now has a new phone that works (!) and she is liking it much better than the old one. On a hunch, I asked the technician to look at my phone and guess what! He got it hooked up and turned on! They actually had new battery, and he showed me how to back up my names online, which he did for me on the spot. I now have a working phone with a new battery, and all my names are safe forever. It turns out that for $1.99 a month I can get set up for automatic backups every night, and I can even log into a Verizon web page, input any numbers I want to, and have them upload automatically to my phone. How cool is that?
Now if we can ever get out of roaming I can use my phone!
We had a very sobering experience on leaving the Verizon store. The quickest way back to the meeting location was to take the beachfront route, and it was really shocking – the amount of damage we saw from Katrina was truly astonishing. For miles there was only wreckage on all sides. Entire areas were wiped out, and there were signs for stores, restaurants, and professional plazas, bent and mangled, but nothing else, only the signs. Apartment buildings were gone or if they still stood, there was nothing inside them. The beaches are closed, and there are signs posted that storm debris is still a danger. It was truly a humbling experience to see it. We didn’t get many photos as there was no place to pull off going our direction, and the traffic was heavy, but we will try to get some in the next day or so.
The realty office where the meeting was held was several blocks off the beach, but clearly still has damage from the storm. Big chunks of acoustical ceiling tile are water damaged, and the air conditioning ducts are hanging loose. They had to use fans in the meeting room to keep it cool.
The meeting itself was great – it was a small meeting, but again, we met some serious and experienced investors. We introduced ourselves, and again, the investors were interested in what we are doing. We passed out our flyers, and got some business cards from several investors.
I found out about the Go Zone, which will also make my list of interesting possibilities. The feds are offering tremendous tax and other economic incentives to investors and developers, etc., in an attempt to get interest and bodies and money back into the Gulf area to rebuild after Katrina. I see huge possibilities here for the wise investor. I’ll keep you posted. Judy, the one who organized the meetings, told us that 65,000 houses were completely destroyed in Katrina.