The #2 Top Agent at Lyon Real Estate

Yowza, this Sacramento real estate agent received the #2 Top Producing Agent Award at Lyon Real Estate for 2012 yesterday — which, in case you’re wondering, does not mean I try harder — yet gazing upon it makes me wonder: where do old awards go to die? My awards fill up two shelves in my bookcase. Many of them are made from crystal or glass formed in pinnacle or other appropriately awardy-looking shapes. Then, there are the plaques. Some of my plaques go back to 1979, when the California Association of REALTORS named me one of 30 people in the state of California who qualified to earn the educational RECI designation, an acronym for Real Estate Certificate Institute, which, when C.A.R. discovered so few agents qualified for the designation or even cared to qualify for the designation, it discontinued the recognition, probably because there wasn’t enough money in the process for C.A.R.

The award for being the #2 Lyon agent out of 900-some is a gigantic engraved crystal vase. It has my name and the fact I earned the top 1% status of all agents at the company. It looks exactly the same as the Top 1% award I won in 2011 when I placed #5 in the company, except that vase is noticeably smaller. So, that must mean it’s a much bigger deal to be ranked in the top 3 agents than to be ranked in the top 5 agents, or maybe the company just had more money this year to spend on crystal vases. Not knocking being a top agent at Lyon, just wondering. It’s not like I can put flowers in the vases because that would be kinda tacky. You can’t really use them for a purpose. They have to sorta sit there and look pretty all by themselves.

I also picked up for the second year the #1 Top Agent Award for the Lyon Downtown office, although our office is actually located in Midtown Sacramento. This office was once located downtown a long time ago in the 1940s, but why change the name now, I guess. We’re just the Lyon Downtown Office, even though we serve Midtown, Land Park, Curtis Park and East Sacramento, as well as the rest of Sacramento and into Placer, Yolo and El Dorado counties. The size of the award is identical to the #1 Top Producer Award I received in 2011. But it’s bigger than the #2 Top Producer award from 2010 and the #3 Top Producer award from 2009. I guess it’s good to see the awards get progressively bigger as the years go on.

But after all is said and done, and I’m kicking up my feet on the deck looking out over the ocean as the sun sets, where will these awards be kept? Will I leave them behind in the states? Ship them to my niece? Box them up in the attic I don’t have? What do people do with old real estate awards?