What an exciting opportunity to spend with my wife and three daughters to see such an amazing life-time event, weather permitting that is, and furthmore experience visible evidence, in my humble opinion, of the very existence of God.  Of course it's everyone's, in most freedom loving countries, perogative to make our own choice as to what we believe and to be compassionate and caring to all people no matter how differing our beliefs might be.  One thing is for sure, no matter what someone believes, we should certainly love and respect each other.  There is evil in this world and it must never become okay for it to be okay.

I came across a couple of really neat websites to learn more about how things will go tomorrow, again weather permitting. The Weather Channel will sometimes show a nice timeline of what to expect and what to look and listen for.  And then here is a website that allows you to enter your zipcode and see the times of all the occurences as well as how much totality you might expect.  Here where I live in the Middle Sound area it says we should have about 96%.  Try it, it's pretty neat.

Now back to today's Solar Eclipse and this Weeks Monday Morning Coffee video I shot early in the morning out on a dock with some guys in their boat catching fish in my "secret" drum hole .

I have the great fortune to be able to meet and visit with hundreds of families each year who call me to discuss selling their home.  Our real estate market here in Wilmington has been quite busy this year, but you have to really dig-in to see what's really selling, why is it selling and why are so many homes still sitting on the market over six months.  

Without going into great detail here, as many real estate agents in our area do follow my video and blog posts, I will say that people that are attempting to sell there home are divided into two sets of home sellers:  (1) are the people that absolutely NEED to SELL FAST as they have some life event driving them to sell their house.  (2) are the people that or watching too much HGTV and listening to too much news about how home prices are doubling.  Also, these folks are relying on sources such as Zillow and other websites whose main purpose is to extort more and more advertising dollars from us Realtors and still they get away with incomplete and manipulated data in too many situations.  These home owners are not really "sellers" they are "gamblers" trying to just "see what happens and maybe hit the jackpot".  

We prefer to work with people who NEED TO SELL as we do like to help people who are nice and do not believe they "know it all" about real estate.  I don't mean this in any kind of mean way, but when I go to a doctor I don't pretend to tell the doctor his/her job and tell him he does not know what he's talking about after he's likely performed hundreds if not thousands of procedures.  Well, I have sold thousands of homes and while I may not know much about a lot of different things, I do know quite a bit about what it takes to get top dollar for property in the Wilmington area, as I have been doing this for nearly twenty years and I was born and raised here in Wilmington.  I have a very simple, but quite "out of the box" system for helping people who NEED TO SELL their home.  I'll be happy to share this with anyone who really NEEDS to sell their home as the "gambler" above would never listen to me anyway.  And again, I mean no disrespect but the overall real estate market would improve faster if the "gamblers" would stay out and let the folks who really NEED to sell be in the market space, so they move on with their life.  

Oh yeh, as I mentioned in the video for home potential soon to be home buyers you really should go ahead and get pre-approved and actually pre-underwritten by a LOCAL mortgage lender.  There are a lot of people to claim to be great but I'll simply say that if I were buying a home I would call the folks at Atlantic Bay Mortgage as they are local and are exceeding my expectations.  Once this is for sure, and I will not mention any names, stay away from out of area big banks who you cannot walk in their office to go face to face if you need to.  First, they don't know our area with all it's coastal situations.  Secondly, they are just not easy to deal with... even with folks who have been their banking customers for decades.  I'm sorry if you work for one of these unnamed banks but big is not always better.  There is something about having a mortgage lender that will meet you face to face and actually sit down at closing with you at the attorney's office.  To learn more about Atlantic Bay click here.