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 once again remembered to set it up the night before. He opened the front door and reached down to pull in the daily newspaper, the Milwaukee Enquirer, and wondered the usual two things: one, why he still subscribed to this rag, and two, how news about the real estate market would be twisted, in this week’s edition.
R. M., a full-time Realtor – capitalized, and with the little ® for professionally licensed, not for registered trademark, after the word – welcomed Sundays, traditionally big days for real estate. This particular Sunday was beginning well. Waving good morning to a jogging neighbor, he picked up the paper without his lower back reminding him that he’d shoveled and snow-blown most of the afternoon before. He extracted it from its protective sleeve and glanced at the headlines. It was still too dark inside to read anything else so he peered his way back to the eastern prospect of his kitchen.
The unreliable coffeemaker hadn’t overflowed today and he poured out that first, always gratifying cup. There was no sports story on the front page to grieve his journalistic standards but there were 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 searching for that. Pausing to refill his cup, he reconsidered his plan to make a special quiche for breakfast. Brunch now, he calculated, and set up the rice to cook.
Perusing the open house ads that did remain, in the much abbreviated real estate news, didn’t take as long as it used to in the days when there was a whole section just for that. 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 customers.
Already in the business in the early 90’s, when there were only the first few conversions of older buildings in the downtown area to condos, R.M. remembered that any 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 made little sense, 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 they got there, but where on earth was the place? And any chance of a listed price?
He could still see in his mind’s eye the years of hopeful buyers, bless their hearts, huddled together over cups of coffee and their Sunday papers, highlighting the places they thought worth a look. He saw them in their cars too, trolling through neighborhoods, pointing and waving their fistfuls of data sheets. 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. More recently, some of the larger real estate companies had offered open house maps—only their own listings of course, but a place to begin—a map, at the very least. R.M. gave out his own condo map to customers because it located all of the developments, in all of the neighborhoods. Location, location, location.
The way we live now, R.M. reflected, it’s all about ‘the phone’, though when we use a smart phone, it’s mostly not to talk. We look up, we watch, we text, we photograph, we send, we map, we 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 years, to the main real estate news, R.M. groaned as he read the various interpretations of the federal stimulus package and its variations. Of course, he’d hoped for some practical explanations, 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 freshly baked cookies at open houses. Really vital news. 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, 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. 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.