Residential Specialist

Starting a new career at an age when most people are retiring, or have been retired for a while, is kind of weird. Starting a new career in an industry that seems to be clinging desperately to its old tethers but is afraid to be perceived as resisting popular sentiment (i.e., that realtors and brokerages are incompetent crooks) and in denial of the market forces magnifying this sentiment is of questionable intelligence. Kind of my trademark (the questionable part). We’ll see.

I have to admit that, prior to jumping through the mind-bogglingly extensive (and expensive) hoops required to become such a professional (to say nothing of excelling at it), my own sentiment towards the industry was fairly conventional. In other words, aside from my experience as a first-time home-buyer with the famous Horace Smith, and my friendship with my current mentor Nick Petitmermet, I possessed scant respect for and even less knowledge about the real estate industry and its “professionals.” My ignorance wasn’t exactly blissful (e.g., the listing agent on our last home sale in Washington was indeed a crook), but it was a thing.

I know different now. Similarly to the education racket (my previous racket), where most people who have no experience as an educator believe that teachers are overpaid babysitters and consequently deserve the kind of respect reserved for all classes “unprofessional,” realtors seem to float around in this well of social ignorance. Of course, there are those who profit regardless and might or might not be guilty of popular (ignorant) sentiment; we see these types of realtors sporting their latest collagen lip injections, heavily made-up in fashion shoots done in swanky contempo-mansions they’re hawking on Instagram or in the pages of Ridiculously Luxurious Homes or Megahomes Monthly. These types, in my opinion, do the industry no favors. I don’t expect they’d agree, or even care.

There are, of course, lots of good, ethical realtors who do a lot more than most non-realty folks realize. In fact, I’d bet that most realtors fit in this slot. I’m learning more than I expected, and one of the things I keep learning, repeatedly, is that I can never learn enough. The parallels to teaching are frightening in this regard. I’m hoping I can use the memory of beginning that profession at the ripe young age of 50 to guide me in this new (for me) profession: there’s definitely a learning curve, but if you stay on it, stay honest, and take your lumps and learn from them you’ll come out on the other side both a better person and a smarter professional.

Another parallel for me in this new adventure has to do with my love for literature. One of my favorite writers, the novelist Richard Ford, wrote a series of books whose protagonist is a realtor, Frank Bascombe. The first book is called The Sportswriter, but he does not become a realtor until the second novel, Independence Day. One of the things I like about Ford’s fiction is how it hones the truth of experience for anyone with enough patience to pay attention to his sentences and paragraphs and reflect on them. Here’s one of my favorites, which I wouldn’t have connected with as markedly before I became a realtor:

My own approach in all these matters and specifically so far as the Markhams [his recalcitrant buyers] are concerned has been to make perfectly clear who pays my salary (the seller) and that my job is to familiarize them with our area, let them decide if they want to settle here, and then use my accumulated goodwill to sell them, in fact, a house. I’ve also impressed on them that I go about selling houses the way I’d want one sold to me: by not being a realty wind sock; by not advertising views I don’t mostly believe in; by not showing clients a house they’ve already said they won’t like by pretending the subject never came up; by not saying a house is “interesting” or “has potential” if I think it’s a dump; and finally by not trying to make people believe in me (not that I’m untrustworthy — I simply don’t invite trust) but by asking them to believe in whatever they hold dearest — themselves, money, God, permanence, progress, or just a house they see and like and decide to live in — and to act accordingly.

Richard Ford, Independence Day (1995)

I think that makes sense. I’d like to think that any residential specialist realtor would agree with Frank Bascombe’s approach to selling houses. What do you think?