Stop me if you have heard this one before: you spend time looking for a good service provider. You go through two or three before you find someone that’s great, then you give them all of your business. Then something strange happens – their prices start to go up, they get more difficult to get a hold of, and they stop meeting deadlines. What do you do when that happens?

I was listening to one of the talking heads over the weekend on one of the paid programming financial shows. His advice to everyone in 2010? Do nothing. Use the year for “planning”. In this time of unprecedented opportunity, all that’s all this guy can come up with?

As a follow up, during my long sit down on Friday we talked about various aspects of commercial real estate. He asked about what I had done, then suggested a course of action that blew me away.

I attended the January meeting of the Renegade Detroit Investors last evening, and their guest speaker was Bob Norton. Bob’s from Michigan and still does a lot of deals here, and last night he talked about where the real estate market here is going. I joined the group last night – if you’re a serious investor in Metro Detroit you should too.