Dinner

14:02 mareku 0 Comments

We had dinner with the Irish board in Herbesaint, one of the best restaurants of New Orleans (or is it the ONLY restaurant in New Orleans were you can get decent food...?) We were later joined by the guys from ziprealty, were my buddy Richard is now CEO. He is having a hard time getting used to the role of being the head of a big public company. In the US that means a lot of regulations to e followed to the letter (and beyond).

Meetings, Meetings and... uh... meetings

14:48 mareku 0 Comments

In ice cold hotels meeting rooms we have lots of meetings with people we hope who can gave us more insight of the trends here in the US real estate business.
We speak with the representatives of Texas, California and the NAR. Because of the recent congress elections we notice that the NAR and its associations are the biggest contributors in political sponsoring. Nationwide most of the money is split 50/50 between the parties, but in Texas they even produced a voting guide to endorse the Republican candidates...
The common vision is that ALL information will be available on the internet sooner then we think and that it is important as realtors to try to keep control over this information (in the sense that you try to interpret the information for the consumers).
We also have meetings with the NVM and ICREA.

Rebuild my house...

14:15 mareku 0 Comments

In the whole of New Orleans you can still see and feel the results of The Storm. Abandoned stores (e.g. Abercrombie) houses being renovated and rebuild. In this drawing of Valencia you can see that even the children are still drawing houses surrounded by water.

Lost suitcases

14:08 mareku 0 Comments

Marijn and I flew to New Orleans today. Because there are no direct flights out of Schiphol we flew via Frankfurt and Washington. The service of Lufthansa was excellent. Unfortunately the transfer time in Washington was to tight for our Suitcases to make it in time to New Orleans. We are now still walking around in our tracksuit.

KP10

09:33 mareku 0 Comments

Ingo gave us this picture last week of our house in the 1960's. As you can see when the famous Dutch Painter Otto de Kat still lived here, it was not much of a decent house yet.

Resistance

09:25 mareku 0 Comments

Just as this lunatic Haggard is exposed I was visiting the Dutch Resistance Museum where they have a very interesting exhibition about the persecution of gays in the second world war. In some countries it seems, not a lot has changed since the last SIXTY years...

Bread Kills

09:23 mareku 0 Comments

After we bought a bread machine last week I have quiet got the hang of it and so I was baking bread yesterday. Unfortunately this was rye bread and it was extra crispy. So when it fell from the cupboard on my head, I got (yet an other) cut in my head...

Dennis and Therissa

09:08 mareku 0 Comments

Yesterday Dennis and Therissa got married in Bloemendaal (The Tides) It was a nice ceremony and we saw a lot of (almost) forgotten old friends.