Reflections on my own Independence Day.
Maybe it's because I'm wading through a small volume called The Education of Henry Adams, 505 pages of late-life crisis and dense Victorian reflection on how one man can spend a lifetime trying to understand the world and make his mark in it and seemingly come up short in both respects, or maybe it's because I figure my regular readers—both of them—are out of town this week and it's garbage time and I can post whatever I want.
Whatever the culprit, I'm in a reflective mood, and so I note that it was twelve years ago this week, over Independence Day week-end 1998, that I left one career, property management, and with the hopeful heart of the innocent (Henry is rubbing off on me) kicked off a new career or, as it turned out, lifestyle, or as it really turned out and as my wife will readily attest, all-consuming life centered solely around selling homes. Since real estate sales is touted as the path to personal and financial freedom, I hoped then that the timing of my move was auspicious and not entirely coincidental.
So how'd it turn out? Let's start with the basics: I'm still here. Given the high wash-out rate in real estate sales, aided and abetted by two serious market downturns, that's not as modest an accomplishment as it might sound, particularly since I don't have a trust fund. And particularly since, as I found out later, no one except maybe the manager who hired me thought I'd make it. Apparently I looked, sounded and acted more like an engineer than a real estate agent, a "problem" that seems to have fixed itself, for better or worse.
Twelve years later, I can confirm that real estate is as advertised, although it's helpful to be blessed with a level of durability and adaptability usually found only in common household pests. The financial rewards are ample, and sometimes more than ample. And as that species of independent contractor called the real estate agent I have the freedom to run my business as well or badly as I like as long as I observe a few simple rules mandated by common courtesy and many not-so-simple rules mandated by courts and legislatures. As a bonus, I can shop at Safeway any day I like and at any time of day I like (and any time I don't have to drop everything to serve a client) or I can give in to OCD and work 24/7.
Beyond these enviable benefits, I get the personal satisfaction of working in a far more challenging field with more sophisticated and knowledgeable peers and clients. That's not a knock on the people I used to work with and for, just an observation of the obvious: the higher the stakes, the more sophisticated the player. Everyone I work with these days, from the first-time buyer to the move-up buyer/seller to the move-down seller, leaves the transaction with a deeper, broader understanding of commercial life in particular and everyday life in general, and with a better understanding of their inner life. Truly, buying or selling a home is a rite of passage, a transformative experience underestimated by those who haven't passed through it.
But beyond even that, real estate gives me the satisfaction of helping people get on with their lives. There's no feeling like it.
Of course, all is not sweetness and light in real estate sales, or everyone would be selling homes and they aren't, although it seemed like it a few years ago. Yes, real estate sales has a downside: take the path of high reward and you're bound to hit a few potholes along the way. Like everyone outside real estate sales and 99 percent of its newcomers, I had some fuzzy idea that the business is an effortless whirl of wheeling and dealing. I badly underestimated the unyielding commitment real estate requires, not just from agents, but from buyers and sellers.
But more than that, I underestimated the misunderstanding and misinformation that surrounds real estate, because as a newbie I shared it. And even more than that, I failed to realize how deeply rooted this ignorance is, not only in our conventional wisdom but in our learned thinking, and how much it limits the success of participants—buyers and sellers as well as agents—in the marketplace.
That was Real Life Lesson #1: no one came to the marketplace as a real estate natural. Everyone, including me, had to be educated, and much of that education consisted of forgetting what you knew. Because it was tougher than it looked. Much tougher. Much like life.
Like any big-ticket marketplace, which is to say like any marketplace that hasn't been and can't be homogenized into a Nordstrom shopping experience, real estate is one of life's few remaining mysteries, at least of the worldly sort. Real estate compounds the problem by being one of the most accessible of mystery marketplaces. Not everyone can buy a home, but anyone can walk through the door of an open house or sit in some hopeful agent's car. Anyone can read an economist's latest take on real estate, and everyone hears the media's take. So everyone has an opinion on real estate. Not only that, everyone feels they should have an opinion on real estate. Because real estate is big news. Real estate is important.
That was Real Life Lesson #2: everyone has an opinion on the hot topic of the day, and has to have an opinion, because to fail to have an opinion is to admit sloth and ignorance. And very few of us are willing to admit sloth, whatever that is, and ignorance.
But once I got into real estate sales, I realized that the marketplace is far more nuanced than any outsider knows. Not only is the marketplace far more nuanced than the general public knows, it's far more nuanced than even what I call the Explainers—the media, the economists—know. Poking holes in their coverage and theories—and given the symbiotic nature of the two, theories and coverage are often identical—didn't require breaking a sweat, let alone any heavy lifting.
The realization that the Explainers don't—can't—explain real estate wasn't just Real Life Lesson #3, it was my own Independence Day. Because it dawned on me that if our best minds and most trusted news sources could mangle real estate so badly—regurgitate raw data as if it meant something, generalize and sensationalize, get the most basic mechanisms of the market wrong or all the above—what injury were they doing the other top stories of the day? And how would we know if they were, unless we tuned into alternate information sources that might have their own limitations? Were our best minds really objective, informed and infallible, or were they, at best, inevitably biased, and at worst, unidentified advocates? Could anyone outside an industry really understand that industry? Or could "best minds" make a living simply by turning conventional wisdom into high-sounding critical language to meet the insatiable demand for high-sounding critical language? Was their PR department, the mainstream media, competent to handle any story more complex than a local freeway accident?
Was the well-known Wizard of Oz scene, the one in which the all-knowing wizard turns out to be a huge prop controlled by a little man behind a curtain, an amusing incident in a children's story or a profound comment on adult credulity? Or, as Henry Adams laments, is almost all we know, no matter how "objective" and how acquired, useless and less than useless?
Of course, questions of this sort can lead to paranoia, to poking around for hidden agendas that don't exist, much as the media and economists poke hopefully around the real estate industry for conspiracies that don't exist. This way also lies rants, although given our veneration of science (or what calls itself science) and the media (despite our claimed skepticism of it) even reasoned criticism of two of our most accepted information delivery systems can sound like a rant. And this way lies alienation from the message and its messengers, alienation more profound than the fashionable alienation of the harshest it's-all-a-lie industry critic.
But here it's all part of the service, no hidden fees or strings attached. So have a safe and sane Fourth, and if you hear an explosion, maybe it's fireworks, or maybe it's me firing another round in my own personal war for independence from the tyranny, not of King George, but of our best minds.