R.M.’s Sunday morning began in the customary way. The dog kissed him awake; he felt, rather than saw his way through the rising light towards the coffeemaker and pressed the start button, pleased that he had remembered once again to set it up the night before. Pulling open the front door and reaching down to pull in the daily newspaper, the Milwaukee Enquirer, he wondered the usual two things: one, why did he still subscribe to this rag, and two, how news about the real estate market would be twisted in this week’s edition.
Sundays are traditionally big days for real estate. R.M. is a realtor, though he always identifies himself as a Realtor, capitalized and with the little ® for professionally licensed, not for registered trademark, after the word. This separates the sheep from the goats, he likes to say, the professional from the hack. The designation to look for in print next to the name to be sure that you get a person obliged to live up to professional standards. Full-time he is too, not like your summer stock crew that arrives and departs on cue every June and September.
This particular Sunday was beginning well. Waving good morning to a jogging neighbor, he had picked up the paper without his lower back reminding him that he had shoveled and snow-blown most of the afternoon before. The coffeemaker hadn’t overflowed and he was well into that first always gratifying cup. There was no sports headline on the front page to grieve his journalistic standards and now no open house ads to check for accuracy either. For the most part, there were no more print ads now, only online ads since the first of the year. Online, like everything else it seemed. Except for coffee – that you still had to drink to get. No good simply looking that up. Pausing to refill his cup, he remembered he had planned to make his special quiche for breakfast. Brunch now, maybe, if I get going, he thought and set up the rice to cook.
Perusing the open house ads that remained in the now much abbreviated real estate section sure didn’t take as long as it used to in the days when there was a whole section just for them. Most of the real estate companies in town had taken their advertising in-house, on their own websites, hoping to capture a larger market share. Not that this necessarily made things easier for the customers, mind you.
Already in the business in the early 90’s, when there were only the first few conversions of older buildings downtown to condos, R.M. remembered that Sunday ads for condos had been few and far between. The whole condo thing had grown so fast in the past twenty years that the print ads had become a nonsense, with page after page of condos for sale, with only the beginning letter of each ad as an unsuccessful attempt at organization. Everybody knew there would be granite counter tops when you got there, but where on earth was the place? And any chance of a listed price?
He could still see the hopeful buyers in his mind’s eye, bless their hearts, huddled together over cups of coffee and their Sunday papers, circling the places they thought worth a look. You saw them in their cars too, trolling through neighborhoods, pointing and waving their fistfuls of data sheets or newspapers. Back in the glory days of real estate, he recalled, some of the more avid went out in the night to collect an early edition just to get a head start. Some of the larger real estate companies had more recently offered open house maps that people could pick up—only their own listings of course, but a place to begin—a map at the very least. He still liked to give out his own condo map to customers because it located all of the developments in all of the neighborhoods.
The way we live now, it’s all about “the phone”. Though when you use a smart phone, it’s mostly so you don’t talk on it, R.M. reflected. You look up, you watch, you text, you photograph, you send, you map, you save, but talk? He wished that more buyers would just talk to him, get straight to it and save themselves a lot of time.
Turning with a sigh, grown deeper every week in the past year, to the main real estate news, R.M. groaned as he read the various interpretations of the stimulus package passed just this week. Of course, he was hoping for some practical explanation, guidelines for people to use to figure out if they could venture back out of the rabbit hole and into the light of day. It had been a long winter already. Groundhog Day had come and gone. There was a hint of spring in the air last week.
But no, yet another in the slowly moving train of articles in a series that might have been called “Really Important Things Every Homebuyer Should Know, the gospel according to the Enquirer editors.” Articles about making room for a small horse, for example, or a guide to the meaning of cookies at open houses. Vital news indeed. Lots of words about the ongoing, undeniable crisis. Lots of chatter about an oversupply of housing. His point was that the majority of buyers were only going to buy one unit and live in it. Not a word about it being possible to purchase desirable property at a good price at a low interest rate, with some new tax breaks, as some of his current customers were actually doing.
The market here was undoubtedly slow, but the paper printed articles from news services implying that things were as bad here as in other parts of the country. He believed this was a dis-service to local readers. So far at least, selling prices, for the most part remained reasonably close to the asking price, compared to other places. Just last week a low-ball offer, made by a buyer hopeful of stealing a foreclosure, had come back rejected, supplanted by a better offer.
No hope again this Sunday paper then. Time to check for messages. Just one phone message, left early this morning by a troubled seller asking why wasn’t there a print ad in the paper this morning for the open house at his place today.