The business of real estate

In mid-December, the Arizona Association of Realtors held its annual Broker/Manager Seminar, which promised to be an educational event. I've been a Designated Broker since October of 2005, but I don't recall being invited last year. In any case, I made my wife and business partner, Cathleen Collins, come with me, since I planned to stick her with responsibility for the action items, if any.

I don't normally go to Realtor events, because they're a colossal waste of time. On the other hand, we love being Realtors, and we will take any real estate class anywhere, time permitting. Alas, we were sorely disappointed by the "seminar."

The event consisted of bad public speakers badly summarizing the printed matter we were given on the way in. What's worse, there were constant breaks. Not like the breaks at a Council of Residential Specialists class -- if you don't give top producers time to return their calls, they'll sneak out to the hall and do it anyway. Instead, the entire room would clear all at once, then everyone would return all at once. Eventually I caught the scent, and I knew what was up: An enormous percentage of these Designated Brokers and Managing Associate Brokers were cigarette smokers.

I had to work it through. First -- even though I'll probably get testy email about this -- no Realtor should smoke. The problem with smoking is not smoking, but, rather, not-smoking. The longer a smoker goes without a cigarette, the less able he is to think about anything but that next cigarette. Can you show houses for hours without smoking? What if your party decides to buy? Notwithstanding the odor on your clothes and in your hair, the accumulated grime in your car, the time and money thrown away on the expression of a death wish, can you swear that there will never come a time when a cigarette is not going to seem more important to you, in that moment, than your clients -- or even your whole career?

And surely this is not the essence of those Broker/Managers, but it's a tidy symbol of why I have never had anything to do with them -- never wanted to have anything to do with them. They're not Realtors, they're not even salespeople. For all of me, they seem like functionaries, people who took an office job so they could have easy hours and cigarette breaks.

And this is why I have nothing to do with Realtor events: They're not about working, they're not even about their alleged purpose: Networking. They're about nothing but not working. Not selling. Not learning how to sell. Not even daring to relax, completely, as the earned reward for past hard work. They're an empty pretense devised to lend a camouflage of meaning to otherwise empty days.

In a word: Ick.

The RE.net is all atwitter about this week's Inman's Real Estate Connect in New York, but the coming week owns an embarrassment of trade show riches. Also on tap this week: The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. And, best of all: The Macworld Conference and Expo in San Francisco.

These are all basically vendor shows, despite the hype -- or, rather, in support of the hype. The big announcements will come from Apple, of course, and much of the 'news' coming out of the other two shows will be fun to make fun of. At BloodhoundBlog, I get no end of mileage out of the goofy crap corporate weenies try to foist off on long-suffering Realtors.

The goofy crap is the true purpose of all of these shows, and far and away the biggest profit center. And from the vendor's side of the table -- like the casino's side of a Blackjack table -- they're a good bet. On the punter's side of the table, the camouflage of meaning will come in the form of keynote speeches and breakout sessions -- providing uncomfortable chairs as a welcome respite from the hours and hours of aimless walking up and down the aisles of vendor booths, each one offering cheap pre-printed promotional premiums in support of very costly unbreakable contracts for useless, goofy crap.

But wait. There's more. A twenty-minute speech is 3,000 words in length. That is, it would take four minutes to read silently. It starts with a joke, often sexist or racist, usually off-color, always lame. It meanders its way through the cluttered claptrap that passes for the speaker's thought processes -- "unaccustomed as I am" and "far be it from me" -- half-baked cliches endlessly masticated but never, ever fully digested -- and ends with a peroration entirely undefended by an argument. These windy suspirations have to be delivered aloud. No one could ever get away with them in print. You could read the text silently in four minutes, but, in reality, given that choice, you would skim it in one minute or skip it entirely.

Is that unfair? At CES, some tech vendors will spend six figures on their presentations -- which might be worth six stifled yawns without the pyrotechnics. Apple's Steve Jobs may be the best keynote speaker in the history of keynote speakers, but the actual news from his oration, thunderously applauded, will boil down to four or five sentences. But, but, but!--at Inman Connect, Move's Allan Dalton is debating Redfin's Glenn Kelman. I'm sure that will be at least as interesting as cage-fighting mantises. But at BloodhoundBlog, Russell Shaw sells 400 homes a year -- more than the whole of the massively capitalized allegedly unstoppable Redfin juggernaut -- and you don't have to hop a plane to tap his mojo.

And this is the way the universe works. If you want to learn something, study and practice. If you want to do something, do it. If you want to sell real estate, the people you need to meet are buyers and sellers -- not vendors, schmoozers or inane amateur public speakers.

I have been to Macworld, which was exciting at first -- like going to Disneyland -- then tiring, then boring, then excruciating -- like going to Disneyland. The entire day at a trade show could be winnowed down to 18 minutes of reading if you were very, very interested, three minutes, tops, if you were not. You could revisit the whole three- or four-day extravaganza in detail in less than an hour -- with time left over for a cigarette break.

We'll be here, taking it all in, of course -- perhaps for even more than 18 minutes a day. But mainly we'll be here working. This is the first selling weekend in the New Year. We're showing. We're listing. And we're not wasting the precious time of a finite life. Fun is fun, and, of the three trade shows, I'd probably pick CES -- just to be in Vegas. But I don't go even a little bit North in the Winter, and, in any case, the business of real estate brokerage is not transacted on cigarette breaks or at trade shows...

-- Greg Swann, BloodhoundBlog

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