These are the moments when I find humor in those who endeavor to practice real estate as a part-time endeavor. Some would say that perhaps they are to be envied, as they have their regular career upon which they can focus ... their drive is not to become the best agent they can for their clients, but to be a choice of convenience for those they know, hoping all the while they don't make some crucial error along the way.

It's 11:02 in the evening ... two of the three children, the wife and the beagle all are in bed. (The 14-year-old likely will not be asleep for another couple of hours in keeping with her gradual transition into a teenage vampire, avoiding the light in favor of her cave-like bedroom.) I've finished glancing at my RSS reader, searching for articles of interest. I've continued tinkering with the formatting on this blog, searching for ways to make it more user-friendly than I already hope it to be. I've tinkered with my other three websites, searching for any missing element that could cause the sites to rise in the search engines. And still sleep eludes me.

My 7-year-old believes I work all the time which, naturally, isn't quite true. But I am on call for large portions of the day. And real estate is a job that demands immediacy.

Yesterday afternoon I received an e-mail from someone in Wittmann looking to place their home and acreage on the market. By the end of the night last night, Christmas evening be damned, he had a response. We'll be meeting Thursday and I'm confident it will be my sign being placed in the front yard of the house.

Last weekend I was dropping off some paperwork at an acquaintance's house, on my way to meet some prospective clients in Surprise. It ends up she wants to put her home on the market, too. We'll be meeting this weekend, once my daughter is back at her mom's and I have a little more time with which to work.

The bottom line is when my clients need me, I am here. I may not answer the phone every time they call (usually because I'm already on the other line), but they will hear back from within the hour. This has held true whether I'm mowing the yard or sitting through a movie. If one of my clients also was having trouble sleeping and e-mailed me now, they'd have a response within minutes. It's what they expect, what consumers in general expect in this Internet-driven age, and it's what I deliver.

Though I have more free time than those punching a clock, the time rarely feels as if it's my own. There ALWAYS is one more phone call I can make, one more web page to update, one more e-mail to send. For a part-time these may not be high priorities. But they aren't building their career on a foundation of service. To fall into a poker analogy, they're waiting for the nuts and being blinded off one fee at a time.

(Translation ... while waiting for the low-hanging fruit of friends and colleagues, they're spending money they may not earn back on licensing, renewals, continuing education and board fees.)

Are they the lucky ones? At 11:12 p.m. (yes, this took 10 minutes) it sometimes seems so ... they're asleep in their beds. But at 5:30 tomorrow morning when their alarms go off, they head to their jobs and they do nothing to expand their real estate knowledge ... I don't think so.

(c) Jonathan Dalton, 2006 / Jonathan Dalton's Arizona Homes

Jeff Brown gets the prize for coming closest on the reason for my "I Love LA" post and the greater point involved, though it's not a case of liking winners (I've been a Tampa Bay Buccaneer fan for 26 years - one Super Bowl win against many, many 4- to 6-win seasons.) It's more a matter of having respect for those who believe higher expectations lead to higher results.

It would be an understatement to say I was gloating last spring as the Los Angeles Lakers opened a 3-1 lead over the Phoenix Suns. It's not that I have anything against the Suns. I find it somewhat cute how every now and again some locally will tab them as championship contenders, while overlooking the fact that such achievement isn't in the franchise's DNA. And I took a significant amount of abuse when the Suns rallied to win the final three games as Kobe checked out for the second half of a Game 7, an admittedly inexcusable act. To my mind, another inexcusable act took place after the game as confetti poured from the rafters. And for what? A second seed defeating a seventh seed.

I didn't care and still don't care that it was a rare feat in professional sports. The fact remains the Suns did what they were supposed to do but celebrated as if they'd won something more significant than a first-round playoff series.

I was covering a Diamondbacks game during Game 7 of the Suns-Lakers series, and was back at the ballpark the following day - a Monday. As usual I was running late and arrived as the second batter stepped to the plate in the top of the first. When asked why I was late, I had a simple explanation: I was caught in the traffic from the first-round victory parade. The parade was facetious, of course, but the idea of celebrating what was supposed to occur was ridiculous.

Back in 1993, the Suns won the Pacific Division while the Lakers snuck in as an eighth seed. If someone calls Charles Barkley for his blatant goaltending call in Game 5, there is no run to the Western Conference title and the NBA Finals for the Suns. But I digress. Within a couple of days of clinching the Pacific Division title, there already was a Division title banner waving from the rafters.

A banner for a division title? Um, sorry.

And again this goes back to my Los Angeles upbringing. When I visited the Great Western Forum in the fall of 1988 (for a Kings game, not a Lakers game) there were only five banners hanging from the rafters - one for each NBA Championship. (Photo note: the above picture is courtesy of The Sports Roadtrip website; the trip was made in 2000, before the Lakers won the last two of their three straight titles.) There was nothing to commemorate the dozen-plus division titles the Lakers had won, not to mention the 1982 and 1984 Western Conference champions who lost in the Finals. Those teams had excellent seasons but missed the overall mark.

So, to me, it comes down to expectations. There's nothing wrong with celebrating the small milestones in an appropriate fashion. After all, it's almost impossible to achieve a larger goal without reaching smaller goals along the way. But when you celebrate the smaller goal as if the larger goal has been attained, that's where I have an issue.

At the start of this year, I set my sights on earning Centurion sales honors - the highest sales level in the CENTURY 21 system. I'm not going to get there. All I managed to do is roughly match my sales numbers from a year ago. Now given the change in the Phoenix market, that's not a bad thing whatsoever. And should my office send Masters Award winners (one step back from Centurion) and above to the convention, I'll drown my sorrows over enough rum to kill a pirate as I did a year ago. But I'll save the full-on bacchanal until I reach Centurion.

To over-celebrate this year's achievement would be to accept and be content with the results. And to be content with the results is to be forever entrenched at your current level.

And translating this to the client perspective, would you as a client really want to work with an agent who was content with mediocrity? Or would you prefer to do business with someone who expects peak performance and strains to achieve that performance in everything he does?

Now, if I pull off another $2MM in closed sales by the end of December, then you can order me the victory parade. I believe the corridor leading from Macayo's cantina to Rock Bottom will do nicely.

(c) Jonathan Dalton, 2006 / Jonathan Dalton's Arizona Homes