I recently spent 27 hours in Las Vegas - about twenty hours more than necessary, in my opinion, but that’s okay. I got to see one of those old school Vegas shows full of feathers and lacking clothes, nurse a heat stroke on the strip at two in the afternoon and donate $3.75 to a video poker machine (which took about thirteen minutes of both winning and losing to accomplish).

 

What I came to surmise during my stint in this city is this: like the effects of any good hallucinogen, Vegas reality is sketchy.  The money part is real enough – the wins and losses. After all, I’m out nearly four bucks. But despite the phenomenal architecture of the mammoth hotel/casinos that would insist otherwise, I was not really in New York, or Venice, or Monte Carlo, or Paris. I was really just in Nevada, in the desert - gondolas, roller coasters, and feathered headdresses aside. And since it happened to be July, the temperature was eight hundred thousand degrees outside. 

 

You’ve got to be able to handle the heat, if you’re going to spend time in Vegas, right? It is what it is, or isn’t actually.

 

The residential real estate market lurks around the edges, I think, of the black hole that is Vegas reality. There are odds to be contended with that will reek havoc or ecstasy with one of the biggest investments of your life. Getting in the game, you play the conditions you’re dealt of any particular market.

 

Housing deals are extremely personal and not personal at all – an impossible dichotomy not unlike jumbo shrimp. It is imperative to stay grounded and let market data speak and teach. This is what is real. Just like in any game of chance, you need to educate yourself so that you’ll know when to let it ride and when to cut your losses.

 

It’s an alternate reality. How things should or shouldn’t be in the end are of very little consequence at the poker or the closing table. When you choose to be at either just make sure you’re temperature ready.

 

And seller, right now it’s eight hundred thousand degrees.