My focus in the meeting and at that time was on the economic implications of the situation. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.” The Federal Reserve had just announced a surprise half-point rate cut, in an apparent effort to support the economy. The stock market had been reeling since the week prior, posting its most significant losses in years. There were 90,000 confirmed cases and 3,000 confirmed deaths worldwide. had just reported its first coronavirus death over the weekend. The general takeaways were that the economy was in good shape, home affordability was at an all-time high, and he didn’t see a recession coming in 2020 or 2021.īut there was already anxiety in the room. I had his deck from the conference and was prepared to discuss some of the key points from his presentation. I had just returned from the CHRISTIE’S International Real Estate owners’ conference, where Lawrence Yun, the Chief Economist for the National Association of Realtors, had given a comprehensive (pre-COVID) presentation on the economy and its relative impacts on the housing market. Not a great way to start the day, especially since the general expect ation of most sales meetings involves enthusiasm, enrollment, motivation, and positivity. I was a little thrown off by some surprising negative feedback privately issued by a newer agent about five minutes before the meeting began. Since I don’t attend every meeting, my presence may have also influenced the attendance. Since it was the first Tuesday of the month, the meeting was held at our Waialae Avenue location, which draws a slightly different crowd than other Oahu locations. It was fairly well-attended-there were around 40 brokers and agents present. On arrival, I drove to our Kaimuki office for our weekly Oahu sales meeting. On March 3 of this year, like many other Tuesdays, I woke up around 5 am, in time to catch the 7:39 am flight from Lihue to Honolulu.
I’m sharing this in the spirit of complete transparency because that’s how we have always operated and that’s how we will continue to operate vis-à-vis our clients, employees, agents, and our community. I wanted to share a chronological unfolding of the events here at Hawaii Life since the beginning of March, as our leadership team has mobilized and marshaled a strategic plan to temper the potential longer-term effects of this 100-year event on our business.
As such, our team has spent the past few months responding as the landscape shifted under our feet and that of the global economy. They are outliers characterized by their extreme rarity and the outsized magnitude of their impact. Especially in retrospect, since we ended up closing 2018 with $1.7 billion in sales, breaking every record we could have imagined for our company in the ten years since Hawaii Life’s inception.īlack swan events, by definition, are impossible to predict. From where we sit today, however, they seem to be in the far distant past relative to the magnitude of this year’s global pandemic.
These natural disasters were unprecedented, daunting, and consequential for our island communities and the Hawaii economy.
PULL THE PIN CHALLENGE 21 UPDATE
In the summer of 2018, I published a mid-year update detailing the back-to-back black swan events that Hawaii was facing that year, including massive flooding on Kauai and volcanic eruptions on the Big Island of Hawaii. Latest News Break Glass, Pull Pin – A Review of March & April at Hawaii Life
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