history lesson

After the last post I sense it's time for a brief history lesson. I've shared this story with seminars and lots of folks I've talked with--both in and out of the business. If you've heard it skip to the next post.

I started in real estate in 1985 in Los Osos, CA. I had just spent 20 years at Arizona State collecting 3 degrees in zoology (evolutionary ecology), learning how to learn and accumulating a huge amount of useless information.

In those days most people in real estate actually went to the office and put in a day working at real estate. They made cold calls, toured new listings and talked about real estate. They did that 5 days a week, sorta 9 to 5. It was like--a job.
On the weekends a couple of agents were "on the floor" and several others were sitting open houses--it was common for agents doing neither to go see other office's open houses if they hadn't seen the listing yet.

They did that because MLS information was pretty sparse. A book with smudgy print showing maybe 20 data fields and one photo that was barely recognizable in most cases. Books were published weekly, but alternated between a BIG BOOK and a SUPPLEMENT. In between there was word of mouth, phone calls and flyer delivery. No faxes, computers were rare (I had a Mac 512K enhanced with external drive and was on the cutting edge--OMG!) and copy machines were--well, challenging.

I learned a huge amount of real estate in my first few months by hanging out at the office and listening to some crusty old school brokers who had started in the 60's.
Interestingly, state and national trade organizations were not a part of daily real estate life. Everyone joined the organizations (it was required by franchise regs for us) and we used the CAR 2 page deposit receipt as a foundation for contracts that mostly came out of Blue Book boilerplate. Trade organization news was not often a topic of conversation.

We talked a lot about houses--pricing, how they showed, how they were built, reaction from clients, etc. In the absence of MLS technology, the only way agents gained knowledge was by seeing the houses and talking to others who had seen them. MLS data was good for pricing, address and bed/bath count--that was about it.

Here's the point (thanks for being patient). If a Buyer walked into a real estate office in 1985 the odds that the agent on the floor had been inside all the houses for sale and had discussed them with other agents were MUCH higher than they would be today. Today, the agent on the floor would probably pull MLS data from the computer almost instantly--but probably would not have been inside a majority of the houses. Now the modern MLS systems have lots of data, but alpha numeric data and photos that are generally poor in quality carry little of the subtle nuance content that tips the buying decision (at least for most Buyers).

Has the quality of service to the Buyer experienced progress in the last 20+ years? Not in a manner proportionate to the technological change. Selecting a place to live remains a primal, personal process, unique to each Buyer. Technology has journeyed down a different path with some help from unexpected sources (how to you spell "profit motive").

3 years ago I gave a seminar entitled "Back to the Future". The idea came at a Christmas season open house where I started talking to a long time friend and broker who had been in the business even longer than I had. We agreed that the years hadn't been all that kind to us, or perhaps, to the Buyers.

History lesson over--incidentally I became manager of that Los Osos office barely 5 months after I started--because I had an opportunity (with some help from my OCD) to soak up decades of real estate experience by immersing myself in the office culture.
Agents starting out today have a huge challenge--just to find a veteran agent, much less to get them to share the myriad of little tips that are the secret ingredient in excellence.

Next we'll look at the gap between technology and decisions.