• greenboxhomes
      • hello Kimberly Dotseth
      • Username: greenboxhomes
      • In response to: "What do you do on the side?" On the side I am a fine-art photography dealer. My collection of art is what inspired me to become an art dealer and open a public gallery, Red Venus Gallery. Now I am a private art dealer.
  • greenboxhomes's latest answers
    • My Favorite Quote of All Time

      • If you're in real estate and I mean REALLY in real estate, then you're probably a deep, dark fan of Glengarry Glen Ross. The 1992 film starring Alec Baldwin as "Blake" and a trough of other fantastic actors has my favorite quote:

        "Put. That coffee. Down."

        (pause)

        "Coffee is for closers."

        I won't spoil the rest. Rent it for a really sad time! As a real estate broker, I love and get the agony of this real estate movie. A classic for the ages.



      • answered by greenboxhomes on 07/15/2010
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    • That Special Book in My Life

      • Without a doubt, any book I would choose to read more than once has to be by James Ellroy. And it better be one of his best, since I don't typically read anything twice. In this case, it is his very best: My Dark Places. I have recommended this book to many people and don't hesitate to recommend it to strangers. It's dark but very powerful.

        James Ellroy is a great, brilliant but slightly wack-a-doo contemporary crime writer who sets his stories in yesteryear: typically the 1950s and 1960s in Los Angeles. Every underbelly dark character is present and accounted for. James has a language all his own, and his fans will know what "hush hush" means in only that James Ellroy way.

        To know his personal history is to understand a bit more the path to My Dark Places. As a child, his mother was murdered after a night on the town. She was a divorcee raising James in El Monte, California. Her companion of the evening she was killed was unknown to James. Described as a swarthy man by waitresses and club owners, that was the singular clue James had to go on decades later when he and a retired Los Angeles police detective try to solve her murder.

        Prior to reading this riveting and in-your-face book, I knew James had been a peeping Tom, among other lowly crimes, was arrested numerous times and served a bit of time. James Ellroy is always very clear about who he is and why he writes the way he does. His own fascination with crime fighting stems, I am sure, from his own experience with petty crime.

        But how much of this life stems from the violent death of his own mother, whose body was found in a high school field? And is this why his first and most memorable book was The Black Dahlia (who was also found in a field)?

        Questions don't always exist to questions having to do with writers as odd and riveting as James Ellroy. That's why this summer I now have to re-read My Dark Places.

      • answered by greenboxhomes on 07/07/2010
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    • I'm an expert

      • It's taken a long time to get here, but I know I am an expert in residential real estate. In fact, it took me my whole career spent in Corporate America working for "the man" to get here. The road was paved with tears, pantyhose, firing people and Christmas parties. Its potholes are filled with too much wasted paper, overtime I will never get back and paychecks spent and gone.

        When you work for a company as I did, and I worked for the best, you can get to the point where no matter what your job title or responsibility, or the size of your check, you feel small. My employers were huge (Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Grubb & Ellis), so you can disappear fairly easily even if you're excellent at your job. It's no one's goal to disappear in Corporate America but it happened to me.

        There were literally hundreds of hours I would spend at my desk or in my office staring off into space wondering what it would be like to sell residential real estate on commission. Come on! That's for people who don't work for The Man every week! That was not for me, but I never wanted anything more in my life, career wise (except the Merrill job, which I will explain another time).

        Drifting toward real estate based work, I was fringing on loans, lending, banking, development, commercial real estate (which I loved A LOT for eight years). But selling houses was so freaking important to me that I couldn't shake it.

        When I finally left the commercial real estate world in 1999, I hung my real estate license for the first time with a residential real estate firm and the woman who was my manager, Kristen Lee, took a huge chance on me.

        To makes ends meet, I got a $40,000 a year part-time job as a pharamceutical rep. Part time was to be 20 hours a week, leaving me 20 hours to get going in my residential career. But here's a shocker: Big Pharma is also "the man" and demanded a lot of my time for travel. 20 hours a week part time turned into 40 hours a week "part time" at really part time wages for the work. Calling on cardiac surgeons is not for the meak. One should be paid accordingly if they're doing that type of work full time, as I truly ended up doing.

        I quit cold turkey one day after calling my then fiance in tears (more corporate world tears!). The only way to excel, become an expert, was to do it wholeheartedly with no fall-back position. Kerry and I got married in 2004. He's been my rock and now hangs his license with the firm I own.

        Pharma got dropped sometime in 2003 I think. It's been full time in residential real estate since then with failure never being an option. Along the way I became an expert and my dream job was mine.

      • answered by greenboxhomes on 07/01/2010
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    • My Favorite Summer Memory

      • I was lucky enough to grow up in the Midwest, something at the time I wasn't too wild about. Minneapolis winters are cold enough to burn your skin so summer memories were and still are precious.

        As a pale Norwegian, being in the sun wasn't a huge past time of mine. Yes, I had my share of times at the pool lying in the sun which now I regret and wish I could take back. That ended when I was 15, not because I had a premonition that the sun would turn out to be very bad for our skin, but because I hated it.

        My greatest memory of summer would occur in early summer, walking home from high school. My walk home was about seven blocks long and followed parallel with the railroad tracks. Sounds seedy! But it wasn't, because the tracks were shielded from a 20-foot wall of lilac bushes. Gigantic lilac bushes for seven blocks. That's a piece of heaven.

        Richfield High School was located on the north tip of my walk at the beginning of these wild lilacs. My walk was south, following the purple wave. These bushes were more like groves you walked up against and were so incredible, so fragrant, that I can almost be transported now, remembering them. But they would die by June and school would end any way, fortuitously convenient.

        San Diego does not support lilacs. Our soil is OK for the plants themselves, but we don't get the winter freeze that the flowers need. In May 2009, I closed escrow for a house in La Jolla and happily got inspired to buy myself something fun. Fun meant a trip to Anderson's Nursery in Del Mar and I bought two lilac trees. Thin, whispy things, they were $75 each.

        They're growing well in my San Diego backyard, but so far there has only been one tiny stem of the purple flowers. Pretty sad, actually. But they smelled exactly the same as the seven-block wall of lilacs that stay in my mind forever. Those lilacs against the railroad tracks are perhaps my best and favorite "summer is coming" memory. (P.S. I named my real estate corporation after them.)

      • answered by greenboxhomes on 07/01/2010
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    • What I Like Most About My Job

      • For me, there are two things I like almost equally about my job, and both happen on the phone.

        When a deal is finally accepted, the agent who represents the party making the final decision will call the other agent with the good news: "We have a deal." That is a magical call and only then do I do the singular thing that each new deal brings. Turning on my trusty Canon adding machine, I do the math on what will be my expected commission for that transaction. Then I tear it off and write on it the expected day of closing and the address. Then it sits on my desk in a little area where hopefully they pile up.

        The second item that is very enjoyable for me is the call from escrow confirming the deal is closed. How does this work? In California, sellers sign and notarize a single piece of paper called a Grant Deed. This document, once filed at the county recorder's office, is the only thing that changes the property from the seller's ownership to the buyer's ownership. Once this is recorded, typically the title company calls escrow, who calls me.

        "Congratulations, we are recorded." Words to my ears! My client's deal is done and that slip of paper on my desk turns into a paycheck.

      • answered by greenboxhomes on 07/01/2010
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