I’m Almost Certain You Didn’t Know This
Let’s not lie to ourselves… In my quest for the perfect and most informative blog, things can get a little redundant and boring. John Q Reader isn’t going to search for a real estate blog unless he/she is actively involved in real estate or they are currently in the market. That’s why I like to mix it up a little from time to time and put out some really interesting things for everyone to read, including those who don’t know a lot about current market trends or terminology. So here are some fun facts that pertain to real estate. Houselogic.com is where I drew the inspiration for these facts.
Have you been invited to a party to help a friend or family member celebrate moving into a new home? This is a tradition that has been around for centuries. The original housewarming party was, literally, a housewarming. Guests brought firewood as gifts and lit fires in all the fireplaces in the home. Obviously this warmed up the place for the family, but it was also believed to ward off evil spirits. Uninhabited homes were thought to attract roaming ghosts, so a new home would have to be rid of that bad energy before it could become a happy abode. I’m sure that when people nowadays say they are going to have a housewarming party, they don’t mean it in the old translation of what that is; nowadays people want their closest friends and family to be familiar with the new place they moved into.
Off subject with this next one? Not really, commercial and residential customers can do what Google does. You ready? Google rents goats to do its mowing. Rather than use gasoline-guzzling, noisy mowers at its California headquarters, the Googleplex building, keeps its lawn manicured by rental goats. They rent goats from a revolutionary company appropriately named California Grazing, which says it can maneuver a herd of goats through crowded city streets to cut grass. It’s an eco-friendly approach to landscaping. I can imagine the company that is told “Listen, we like you guys and you do a great job, but we feel that goats can do it better. ” Try letting your old landscaper know that they have been replaced by goats. Might not go over so well. I think this is a really cool way to cut the grass. Hopefully they have a human that cleans up the “fertilizer” the goats probably drop off during the grazing.
We went on the light side, so let’s now go to the dark side. According to an old superstition, if a bird flies into a home, death is soon to follow. Long before “put a bird on it” became hipster décor, birds were thought to symbolize imminent death for the home’s occupants. People have long connected birds to the spirit world, and it’s evident in our culture, a couple examples are Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “The Raven” and Alfred Hitchcock’s movie “The Birds.” More recently there was the movie “The Crow”. Personally I don’t believe in all of the superstition or mysticism that accompanies the spirit world. If a bird flies into your home, it was most likely because the bird thought there would be food, company, water, or warmth in there. Then again, maybe the bird just made a mistake. Birds can get off course too!
A lot of countries have a serious fear of earthquakes. Although they are not prevalent in most areas of the United States, there are certain areas that have a ton of earthquake activity. If you buy a house in California, you are given a “Guide to Earthquake Safety”. Other countries have suffered great loss from earthquakes. Japan is notorious for having a major earthquake that destroyed a nuclear power plant and caused global concern. In response, a Japanese company has developed a residential earthquake-proofing system that raises a house off of its foundation as far as 3 cm using just air pressure. So the building will literally levitate. When an earthquake hits, compressors activate, forcing an immense amount of air under the home. The house will levitate there until the earthquake ends, then be placed gently back on the foundation. Zany and inventive but it can save millions in property damage and it can save lives. Awesome invention.
In conclusion, real estate is all around us. Commercial, Industrial, and Residential are in our lives. We see it daily and we rely on it in the modern world. It doesn’t have to always be so cut and dry, we can actually learn a lot about cultures, people, and communities just by studying the local real estate. Hope you had fun reading this and I hope you learned something as well.